If I was in management, I'd at least consult my HR department about it. Better safe in court.
Sometimes I get harsh criticism, I can get momentaneously defensive and it hurts a ton but you won't see me lashing back at the person and chances are you'll see me thanking them.
Agreed, it sucks. But unfortunately in today’s environment, there are enough people creating social media backlash over well-intended advice that it is necessary. Successful people are taking career and social risks by merely speaking openly to people they do not know. The best way to lower that perceived risk for them, and to improve your odds of getting useful advice from a wider array of successful people, is to present yourself as someone who will not crucify them for trying to help.
Fwiw I upvoted your first comment and down voted the ones talking about votes.
I wonder if there should be a policy where you can only downvote if you leave a comment on it first. And somewhat relatedly I think the policy should extend to flagged posts.
As a one-off (or a personal "hack"), the NDA is an offering of empathy. Sharing sincere feedback is hard. Offering the NDA shows that the advice-asker is worried about the advice-giver's well-being. It's nice and genuine, and I hope it will work.
But, this idea seems so GOOD at first blush, that I'm afraid it will become widespread and lose sincerity. Anytime feedback is involved, the NDA appears as legal boilerplate. It's no longer a personal connection built on shared vulnerability. Instead, it's a corporate threat: "If you want advice, we can either be friends or go to court."
I don't think this is precisely correct. In the situations like in the article, the issue is that both parties are playing a dance around _what kind of feedback/criticism_ is acceptable.
If I ask you "why might my business fail?", and your gut reaction is "your personal life is a mess", do you tell me this? Even with an NDA, that's _super harsh_ feedback.
(This feedback would hurt me more AFTER the NDA. The NDA would change my expectations around the types of feedback. I'd expect "you're not a good programmer" or "you don't work enough hours to beat the competition".)
But if I _really_ wanted to have my business succeed, that's feedback I probably need from someone other than my therapist. :)
Fair enough. I'd only tell if you were a good friend and even then it would probably take a drink or two at the pub.
I don’t even think it would be good to require a private explanation when downvoting or flagging. In my experience with other services with user-generated content, negative feedback signals for community driven moderation are very valuable and most users never give them. You want the process to be as streamlined as possible. You can give more weight to feedback from more trusted users, which HN does in a transparent way by gating the flag and downvote options to accounts with more reputation.
To be clear, I think the comment here is a good contribution. There’s a lot of passion about this topic and the system seems to break down somewhat.
I always assumed that was the point of the document to begin with.
This is worsened by many people doing a poor job of providing said feedback, for a myriad of reasons: because they never learned how, because they were never in an environment conducive to doing so, because they flat-out just don't care, etc.
Not to mention, there's also the fact that some pills are just straight-up hard to swallow. I've had to choke down more than a few of those, and it took a long time for me to develop the maturity to do so productively.
An NDA doesn't fix any of these problems.
Absolutely! I've successfully built and run such training.
Most things are trainable skills. For example, I'll never be able to run as fast as Usain Bolt, not by a country mile. But, if I develop my running skills to their maximum potential, I'll be able to outpace a pretty good chunk of the rest of the population.
Same goes for communications, programming, whatever. You might not have what it takes to be The Best In The World, but most people definitely have the potential to become unreasonably competent at a thing, should they choose to put in the work.