Ivy League Psychologist: 'bring Your Whole Self to Work' Is Bad Advice

Well, look at the time dependence. 20 years ago we were leftist, today centrist, tomorrow right wing. We're just following the same pattern but are the first to be wholly expressive on the internet about it.

A person shouldn't say things like this - re: interviewing with a swizzle stick in one's pocket and confetti in one's hair - if they are a manager:

"George Carlin - Tell the boss (who's the boss)" https://youtube.com/watch?v=p5x7-0mR86A&

I've had to hide laughter in probably almost every interview since learning of this approach to interviewing.

CLI: Clean Language Interviewing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_language_interviewing

I'm more of a three-hour workweek sort of manager.

What a time it was to be alive before the Culture War (tm) in San Francisco.

I worked at a household name tech company and you could draw a pie chart of Libertarian, (Self described) Communist, Progressive, Anarchists, and everything in between. Drugs weren't really controversial but you had an entire spectrum of personalities and drugs that were popular in different groups. Everyone kind of accepted each other to be honest.

I behave this way too. But I also fear it leads to a degree of split personality disorder... and feeling a bit like a fraud.

Manners are the grease of society, as they say.

The whole point of school is to teach kids social facts like this. It's certainly not to teach them algebra or literacy.

> Great, so you have to pretend 40 hours a week

You don't have to do anything - if it's more important to you to bring your authentic beliefs and opinions in front of others - you're free to do so. But if your number one priority is getting ahead at work - or simply aiming to develop social cohesion with a group around you, conforming to that group's beliefs and culture are helpful. This applies not just to the 40 hours you work, but to any group you want to be welcome in, whether it's your school, country, church or sports team. And after a little while, it's not really pretending anymore.

> Maybe we should tell kids that in school

Half of the reason we have school is to socialize kids to these very concepts. We obviously lecture about peer pressure, but most of this is learned innately. Society couldn't exist without these social pressures, even though they're not always beneficial.

Pretend what exactly?

I find it easy to go to work and do my work and just choose not to share some things. That's not pretending as much as good healthy boundaries.

I once sat next door to a group of HR folks who brought their personal lives into the office every day. People in conference rooms I booked crying and so on. Now a random one off of that, whatever, but it happened a lot and people bringing their emotional issues TO work really felt like a weight on me and those around me.

Boundaries can make work a heck of a lot easier to deal with. Depending on your situation it can even be an escape at times.

> Great, so you have to pretend 40 hours a week.

Pretend to what? Not sure what this means.

My "whole self" is my hobbies and my passions and interests. A few of those overlap with the stuff I do at work. At work I do the work stuff, which conversely also overlaps with my passions (that's why I'm there). Other passions don't overlap with what's useful at work, so I don't do those there. I'm not pretending, just not doing those things at work.

The kids already have to pretend during school and maybe at home to please parents. I think they're aware

Living in a society with other people who you interact with is about compromise and that means behaving in a way that aligns with social and cultural norms - which change from place to place.

I interviewed for a major company and was rejected for being "too combative" after I corrected an interviewer on what unit tests are supposed to cover. I got hired somewhere else and my boss mentioned he had also been rejected by the same company, so I mentioned that they rejected me over being combative. My boss laughed, like rolling on the floor laughing about it - because our company culture was so different that he considered me a peace seeking negotiator between teams.

Culture fit is real.

Isn't this just baked into the social fabric of humanity?

Yeah, its a perfectly fine system. You don't have a friend who you don't talk about the same things that you talk about with another friend? Or things you don't share with family? whats the difference?

It's called being professional. Your coworkers don't exist to be a sounding board for political, religious, or overly personal topics. This is just the baseline. You don't need validation about that stuff to do your work. Pushing people out because they don't have the same "vibe" is counterproductive and makes everyone worse off.

If you told kids in school the truth, it would be that juvenile attitudes die hard. Adults are too often like big kids. Looks and superficial stuff still matter a lot, although you can still get admitted to companies if your job requires actual skills or characteristics that you have.

Have you never worked before? This is most jobs. lying to kids isn't going to help.

> Great, so you have to pretend 40 hours a week

I think this is an important realization - you are in a sense being paid to play a role at work, and there is a script for that role that everyone expects you to follow.

One of the benefits of having such a script is that it standardizes how to interact with people in a particular role, and reduces the friction of having to change workflow based on a specific person.

> [...] then what work is this phrase even doing? Why does anyone even say it?

Most people are far more emotional than logical (possibly as a consequence of a lack of basic education in logic). They are not precise with their language, and they are not logically consistent in their words and actions. A lot of them (most?) tend to say things that make them feel good, or that they aspire towards, not things that are actually true. It's not even a conscious choice to lie, they're too used to being like that, and there isn't enough peer pressure to change since most people are like that, too.

A technical person on the spectrum should consider most people inherently "bugged" and treat all their outputs as unreliable.

It’s rhetorical. It sounds and feels nice to a subset of the population. And I do believe it’s literally true for a small subset of the population. The people who have a personality that fits well into corporate structures, who believe in “the mission” and whatnot.

If I could only make this comment more visible. I worked in 2 extrema of the spectrum. Ones would say nothing personal, strictly professional, never curse, like robots (any experience in Japan) The others would come, curse constantly, even calling a college would imply calling him literally “you son of a b*”, people would loudly talk about sexual encounters, and other private things (south Italy, south America). I asked both groups (as I have friends in both camps) what do they think about the other way of interacting: both think the other group is abnormal, awkward, and would not like to work in “such a terrible place”

Maybe adjust it to "only bring the most professionally effective and contextually appropriate subset of your authentic self to work."