I was really impressed with how successful RC is at maintaining an environment where people can learn and grow. Part of that is certainly selection effects- the point of center is self directed growth around programming, and there's an interview process that I assume filters especially hostile people.
But I think the social rules do a lot too, and have been trying to pay attention to the effects on others when someone breaks them at work. No Feigned Surprise is a particularly important one around people who are trying to learn and already a little insecure. It's great when they've learned a new thing, and you want to celebrate that, not meet it with denigration!
Even your "calm" version probably doesn't need to exist. If there's something they want to do and they're asking you about how to do it, by all means, it may be relevant to tell them that learning a new thing would potentially help them.
Otherwise maybe worry less about what other people should or shouldn't know.
Just go straight to explaining it helpfully. Don't make the knowledge gap itself a point of discussion at all.
However, the rule is really about not doing something that makes others feel bad about not knowing something or asking questions, like you said. The “No feigning surprise” phase has been a perfect hook to get people to read and understand what it means.
In some environments, feigning or exaggerating surprise really is abused as a social status and hierarchy establishment trick. Those who use the trick are trying to turn a question or gap on someone’s knowledge into an opening to elevate their own status, often in front of others. If you haven’t seen this trick used (abused) then you’re lucky. In my academic and early career I was in some environments where not knowing something was an invitation for the vultures to circle and try to turn the situation into a show of their superiority on some imagined social hierarchy. It sucks. I suspect the Recurse Center introduced this rule after having a person or batch of participants who started doing this, because it’s really toxic when it is normalized.
"Joke's on you. I worded it poorly intentionally!"
As I said in my post, I suspect they were addressing a situation they were seeing in their cohorts and it happened to resonate with more people and in broader contexts than they expected.
> No feigning surprise isn’t a great name. When someone acts surprised when you don’t know something, it doesn’t matter whether they’re pretending to be surprised or actually surprised. The effect is the same: the next time you have a question, you’re more likely to keep your mouth shut. An accurate name for this rule would be no acting surprised when someone doesn’t know something, but it’s a mouthful, and at this point, the current name has stuck.
It does a learner no good to hear that you are shocked by a skill deficit. If you're planning to be around people who are in a learning space, you should not be surprised if they don't know something. And even if you are surprised, it is kinder to not show it.
I don't think this rule is universal. If you're in a professional environment where, say, you're coding C++, and a new collegue with five years of purported experience claims to have never used a pointer, it would be okay to show surprise. And then maybe speak to your shared leadership chain. Learning environments are special that way.
Counterpoint: Most workplaces would be best served by a team of developers who help up level each other without causing morale issues when knowledge gaps, which everyone has, inevitably show up.
This type of environment is the best for software development organizations specifically because most software development shops that have more than one person working on a codebase or system or set of systems have already reached the point where no single person can keep the whole thing in their head at once.
Maybe that person really worked in an environment where they didn't have to think about pointer arithmetic. Reframing closing knowledge gaps as a beneficial and necessary part of a healthy development system makes it so when somebody doesn't know something and needs help they are willing to get it quickly. And that they will talk about knowledge gaps openly so they can be filled with the collective pool of the organization .
Shutting that down even by just "narc-ing" on the person just makes it that much harder when others need to know something they don't to get a job done, slowing down the system over time.
Now, human interaction is squishy, so yeah, they are also trying to cover the all-too-common-in-tech case where someone is just being an asshole. Let's call it the Comic Book Guy case. In this case, it actually doesn't matter whether surprise is feigned or not, because what's actually happening is this person is listening and waiting for someone to express a blind spot so they can prove their intelligence by correcting them. You can't really write down an explicit deterministic rule for this, because it's all cognitive behavior social stuff that people are generally unaware of moment to moment. However the recurse center rules plus live feedback when it happens is as good of a solution as I can imagine.
> I think it's generally best to be open in communicating with others
I’m pretty sure you wouldnt blurt out “you sure got fat” in a buisiness meeting, even if it genuinely was the first thought which popped into your head. Not every thought or feeling need to be communicated.
I agree with bazoom42 in the context of the correct comic:
I found the most helpful reframing is to replace the words and emotions with ones that encourage learning and question-asking. For example you can try being excited instead of surprised, or say something like, "that's a great question, let's figure it out together."
Going through the Fermi estimation in the xkcd comic Ten Thousand also helped me to be a lot less genuinely surprised when someone didn't know something: https://xkcd.com/1053/
So “feign unsurprise.”
I would argue that the real in-group/out-group behavior is excluding people who aren't naturally adept at being social.
Yes.
> is being unsurprised they are ignorant putting them down
Again, the whole reason to just declare this as a rule is so that you’re not put in a position to try to decide if somebody is ignorant or not. You set a social guideline, and if people break it, you point it out, and it doesn’t matter why they did it.
If I say it's a social guideline to not tell somebody about something wrong with their outfit unless they can fix it in under 5 minutes, I'm not suggesting you go around assuming that everybody knows they have a stain on their shirt. I'm telling you it's net-negative to point it out to them.
People who are open to listening are not pretending to be surprised in order to put somebody down. They are actually surprised and (perhaps) unintentionally hurting somebody. If that somebody is hurt, they need to ask themselves which hurts more, having somebody surprised you didn't know something (aka they think you are smart), or being unsurprised you are ignorant of something (aka they think you don't know stuff).
Not usually, no. They haven't (for the most part) adopted gatekeeping behaviour just to be dicks, they've adopted it as a method of signalling to other members of the in-group that they too belong to the in-group.
From their perspective, the effect on the person in the out-group is merely collateral damage.
This is telling people to assume people are ignorant or at least pretend you think they are ignorant.
Thats about 50% of what they’re saying. The name comes from the other half.
The social rules work so well that I wish tech cos would just adopt these as baseline. They make interacting with other technical folks much more enjoyable.
edit:rhplus beat me to it
I really enjoy sharing a planet with Ms. Evans. She seems to be a genuinely decent person, and we could always use more of those.
That said, her bluesky or mastodon profile leads with “I have DMs muted from people I don’t follow”, which just rubs me in such a wrong way. The vibe is “don’t be confused: communication is for me to give and you to receive, and NOT the other way around”.
I’m sure she has her reasons (presumably weird/angry onliners), but this - and in particular its digital real estate indicating it’s one of two facts you need to know about her - feels like the digital equivalent to checking out at the grocery store with headphones on: “I don’t know you and I don’t want to know you.”
Just makes me feel sad seeing things like that, and I don’t know that I resonate with being happy to share a planet with people with such world views. They certainly don’t seem happy to share it with me.
One thing about living a life, where you share a lot of personal information, is that people tend to create close relationships that are entirely one-way.
In many ways, this benefits the celebrity, because they get rich/famous from it, but it can also lead to some fairly serious consequences. I was just reading yesterday, about some young lady that had to get a really toothy restraining order against a nutter that keeps trying to break into her house.
Many of these folks are really "people people," and the need to restrict access truly bothers them, but it's basically a requirement for their life.
I can't hold it against her - it isn't the 1990s anymore, the entire web has become an aggressively toxic space and one has to curate everything nowadays.
[1] https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/10/06/new-talk--making-hard-things...
One quite positive, and sharing an excellent link (thanks).
One neutral, and sharing the xkcd link I referenced (thanks).
A couple of anonymous downvotes. I assume because it says something positive about someone, and we'll have none of that, here, thank you very much.
It's entirely possible that people can be decent to each other. I know, I know, that's crazy talk, but I'm kind of relentlessly positive. I have had plenty of negative fuel, but I guess I'm just a Pollyanna.
[0] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qQDAuhGvBvBlZVH2zn_V...
This is nearly comical phrasing given the topic of the page.
I provided enough context about the specific kind of comment I found to be in bad faith that I don’t understand why you felt concerned that I took offense to any mentions of xkcd.
I tend to hang with a fairly ... unkempt ... crowd, IRL. Many of them have been through serious personal trauma, and have great difficulty seeing anything good in life, or in others.
They are a minority, in society, in general, but some communities tend to gather them in greater numbers (like the one in which I participate, which is about people trying to heal from trauma, amongst other things).
It's not unusual to encounter folks that sincerely believe that expressing optimism, open-mindedness, or kindness is an expression of weakness, to be treated with contempt. They sincerely believe that these expressions of positive energy are fake -often for good reason, as they have seen plenty of fake good faith.
I have learned not to allow myself to be drawn into their world, which often means that I am treated with contempt.
I shrug it off, and continue to be positive, anyway. I enjoy Julia Evans, because she remains relentlessly positive, in a community that is often ... unreceptive ... to that kind of energy.
They either meant to post https://wizardzines.com/comics/no-feigning-surprise/ or https://wizardzines.com/comics/surprise/ with a title that has any relation with it.
> I can write 500MB/s to a hard drive? that's so much!
Turns out a Seagate 2X18 can write at 528 MiB/s according to its spec sheet. [2] My rule of thumb was that HDDs could do like 100MB/s (aka 800 Mbps) but I guess between density improvements and this new "dual-actuator" class, it's gotten a lot faster. HDD seek time has basically been stuck for 30+ years and probably will remain so but capacity has increased a lot, and the throughput for sequential access probably should scale with capacity [edit: times rpm, thanks Retr0id]. For a while I think it wasn't increasing, but I guess they decided to fix that?
SSDs of course can do way more than 500 MB/s, and you can do better by compressing as you write (depending on your data), and you can stripe across multiple HDDs, but it turns out none of those are necessary.
[1] as I write this, the title "no feigning surprise" suggests <https://wizardzines.com/comics/no-feigning-surprise/> but the link points to "say something surprising" <https://wizardzines.com/comics/surprise/>.
[2] https://www.seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/exos-2x1...
Typical "feighning suprise" is with pet attack. "It does not bite". What a big suprise when it does bite, it "never did it before, did you provoke it"? Later you find that thing send 5 people to hospital, and entire street has delivery services suspended.
I feel like the "falsehoods programmers believe about [thing]" is a little similar, but about correctness and never about performance.
For the last 5 or so decades we've been transitioning from a world where everyone watches the same 4 TV channels to a world where everyone is in their own niche, and the tendency to be surprised that someone doesn't know about some cultural phenomenon is directly proportional to age. The way boomers gape and stutter when I said I don't know much about The Beatles...