(Like this article? Read more Wednesday Wisdom! No time to read? No worries! This article is also available as a podcast). You can also ask your questions to our specially trained GPT!)
This article is one in a series of gifts that you can give yourself. Previous articles include: The gift of time, The gift of modesty, and The gift of leaving.
A few weeks ago, a former colleague contacted me on LinkedIn and wrote: “I have an honest question: How to stop myself from writing a nasty comment under every second post? From cheesy inspirational to plain wrong, it’s triggering me more and more…” This is of course a great question, because I am feeling that urge myself too. So much in fact, that in my mock “year in review” post I had a special category that said: “5,384 replies to dumb posts started, but not sent.”
I would say that at my core I am a nice person, but I have been known to correct people in a humiliating way. This is probably explained by me suffering from serious self-esteem problems ever since my childhood. Really, the only thing that I had going for me as a child was that I knew more than other kids and I let that show. This did not make me particularly popular, because nobody likes a 14 year old smart ass, especially not the other 14-year olds, but at least I could console myself with the thought that I was right and that as soon as we hit the phase of life where being right mattered, I would outdo my classmates.
In the meantime, I kept myself entertained reading science fiction. The fifth book of the “Demon Princes” series by Jack Vance (title: The Book of Dreams) held a special appeal to me, because in that book, the last of the intergalactic crime lords pursued by the protagonist, went back to his planet of origin to attend a school reunion. There he confronted his erstwhile tormentors and inflicted a series of innovative punishments on them. Ohhh, if only I would be able to do that…
I did not become an intergalactic crime lord of course, but I did pick up the notion that being right was important and that being nasty about it was cool. I have no clue where that last idea came from, but I am ashamed to say that I spent a large part of my adulthood as an arrogant prick who relished correcting other people in a potentially humiliating way, with no other goal than to be right and to be seen to be right.
Fast forward a few decades.
When I joined Google, I experienced something that I had never experienced before: I had found my people. Here was a group of people that knew at least as much about computers as I did (usually more), who liked the same movies, had read the same books, and shared the same sense of humor. They were also mostly, like me, insufferable know-it-alls, which could make conversations a bit tedious. To this very day, I have an allergic reaction to someone starting a sentence with: “Well, actually…”, though I am fully aware that I used to do this myself a lot and maybe still do from time to time.
At Google we had a few people who were actively not nice. At the time we still had desk phones and one of our colleagues recorded a voicemail message that was incredibly insulting to the hapless caller, chastising them for daring to phone him in the first place and announcing that their second mistake was that they were still on the phone, because surely they were not planning to leave a message? The MP3 of this voicemail message did the rounds and we all thought it was incredibly cool.
Not being nice was a bit of a cultural phenomenon at Google. One night I was sitting at home and my pager went off with an irrelevant (for a page) message like: “Yeah, sure, we’ll see each other tomorrow” or words of that nature. At Google, you could page someone using an email alias and apart from personal aliases that could be used to page individuals, there were also aliases to page the current oncall of a service or to page all oncalls for all services in a particular datacenter. Because of some auto-completion mishap, someone had included the alias of all oncalls for all services in a rather large datacenter in the CC of a random email and the system obliged. I immediately reached out to the sender of this email and informed them what they had done, that I was not upset, that this was an honest mistake that everyone could have made, but also that they probably would get a fair amount of abuse from my colleagues and that it was best to brace for that. Unfortunately, that torrent of abuse happened.
As you can see from this example, I had become quite a bit nicer by then. But why? As we say in Dutch: “That sits as follows”:
At Google I volunteered for many extracurricular activities, such as teaching a group of fifteen year old secondary school kids about our infrastructure.
For this activity I developed a two hour workshop doing a load test on a simple HTTP server. We validated the results of the test with some basic queuing theory, since the math to predict the behavior of a system using an “M|M|1 queue” is well within the scope of the mathematical abilities of a group of middle schoolers.
Because of this extracurricular work, I started interacting with people outside of Google’s engineering community, such as recruiters, event coordinators, and our K-12 outreach people. I became quite friendly with some of them and eventually they confessed to me that the first time they had to meet me for some project they had been quite nervous as they used to be afraid of me. “How can that be?” I cried out: “I am the nicest person I know!”
This is of course not true. The nicest person I know is my brother in law Allen, but to be fair, I didn’t yet know him at the time.
They explained that their entire experience of me until our first meeting was on company-wide mailing lists and I had to admit that on that particular medium, I wasn’t always as nice as I maybe could have been.
All of this led to a period of introspection and some much needed therapy. One therapist in particular modeled this sort of behavior as having a “hard belly” and a “soft spine”, meaning that the initial interface that someone had to break through was tough, but that, once they got through that, there was a surprising lack of backbone. According to him, the opposite was preferable: A soft belly, but a strong spine. Yes, that makes it possible for others to hurt you superficially, but not fundamentally, which also means that the people who don’t know any better do not immediately get their head bitten off for every little “transgression”.
This then leads me to the seemingly unrelated topic of theater improvisation. If you have ever taken any improv classes, you will know that really the only thing you are not allowed to say on stage is “no”, because once you throw that in, there is really no place to go but conflict, and conflict is rarely fun to watch, especially if the people in the conflict do not know what they are doing, which is often true in both improv and real life. Instead, the most valued answer is “yes, and”: Accept whatever the other person is offering and add something to it. Even if it is a bad idea. Even if you have a better idea.
Not being nice is counterproductive. One of the nastiest teams that I ever worked with was a network group that for otherwise good reasons were in the critical path of every project that needed to accept traffic from the Internet, which these days is pretty much every project. They were overworked and their pager was continually on fire. Their infrastructure was complicated and because of that, people needed lots of help to get it right. As a consequence, they started seeing everyone who wanted something from the networking infrastructure as someone who was out to make their life difficult. They were not very nice and everyone was afraid of them.
Unfortunately, this was counterproductive as people started scheming to have as little to do with them as possible, for instance implementing suboptimal solutions rather than requesting a change to some networking infrastructure or sending the most junior people in the team to the networking team’s office hours, because more senior people were not keen to have their head bitten off by some networking engineer who was way more junior than them and who had unfortunately signed on to the networking team’s toxic insider/outsider culture.
One problem with not being nice is that it infects other people, especially new members of the team, who will come to think that this is the accepted and cool thing to do here.
Nice is not just nice, not nice often just doesn’t work. If you are not an expert in something, are you going to risk asking someone who is going to insult you if you are wrong? Even the ultimate benevolent dictator in charge of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds, eventually saw the light and the kernel developers now have a code of conduct that promotes “making participation in [the] project and [our] community a harassment-free experience for everyone”.
Another problem with not being nice is that negative emotions do not inspire anyone. This is important because you may in your hearts of hearts be a loner who wants to do nothing else but sit at their computer by themselves and crank out code, but software engineering is a team sport and to accomplish anything of value requires other people to follow you. You may think that people follow you for the quality of your ideas and work, but unless you are Linus Torvalds or someone of a similar stature, you will be way more successful if you are nice. And even if you think that you are a rockstar, you are probably not Jeff Dean, and he is well known for being nice and approachable (if a bit intimidating but there is not a lot that he can do about that).
Which brings me back to the original question: How to be nice on the Internet in the face of an incredible flood of underinformed, humblebrag, misleading, or just outright fake, messages, some of which are actively harmful to boot?
This is clearly a challenge, at least it is for me, especially when I see how “successful” some of these posts are in terms of engagement, which is of course a terrible measure of success because lots of bad and terrible things (or people) are incredibly popular. I struggle with this mightily because a lot of these posts are incredibly annoying and quite frequently a powerful urge inside me wants to correct these people in a potentially futile attempt to help make right what their parents and the almighty clearly did wrong. This urge frequently gets the better of me, as my followers on LinkedIn can attest to, but more and more often it does not, because I want to be nice and I do realize that I am spending too much time and energy on something absolutely useless that will not help the world one iota. Even worse, by responding I create more engagement for this post and I might grow its audience because the LinkedIn AI will now bring my reaction to the attention of the people in my network.
What helps me overcome this urge (though not always) is that I want to be nice because it just feels so much better and I have enough stress already. I have long given up any dreams of doing something that is world changing or so impressive that people look at me in awe for that. Instead I have just one dream left: I want to be someone, who someone would want to be. I want people to point at me and say: “There goes a nice guy who overcame all the challenges of existence and who is happy with who he is, where he is, and what he is doing”
Unfortunately, I still have a long way to go, but being nice to everyone in all circumstances is a good start.
And with that said, I wish you a happy new year 2026!
