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by gelisam
4448 days ago
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After reading the title but before reading the article, I was trying to imagine a situation in which anybody might want to fake surprise in a work environment. The only thing I came up with was as a teaching mechanism, as in: "your program is crashing when you divide by zero instead of returning NaN? How strange! Let's investigate together". I was quite surprised to see that by "feigned surprise", the article actually meant something along the lines of "really, you expected an integer operation to return NaN?". The article does explain why people might say that, but I still have a hard time believing it. Why would anybody want to say that? It's not helpful at all. I guess I must be lucky never to have worked in the bad working environments described by the article. |
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The way I read the article (and think about this topic in general) is pretty close to the way I perceived the part of your response that I quoted.
Essentially it often combines explicit or implicit generalized language (anybody, nobody, everybody, etc) with an assertion that something is "obvious" or in some other way "beneath" the person saying it. It's not necessarily that people want to say it but more likely that they are unaware of what they're saying for whatever reason. By giving it a name Hacker School is letting people realize the topic and, hopefully, reducing occurrences.
IMO "Feigned Surprise" is a bit of a misnomer but I haven't come up with anything better to call it. It may be more correlated with imperfect articulation of people's assumptions than actual surprise.