Negative vs. Positive style

[shustrik]

We (immigrants from the USSR) internalized our negative, critical style during Soviet times - we learned to quickly understand why many things should NOT be done. We learned to avoid punishment, and in order to avoid punishment one should NOT do certain things

Comments

A bit of pop-psychology

[girit]

Just doing it does not take one far (unfortunately). Even if some level of automation is achieved, DOING will still be ‘in spite of’, not ‘because of’. At the end of the day we still believe that things will go bad. This Russian reflexive and poisoning pessimism, that goes far beyond Soviet Union. And ‘they’ have a belief that ‘life is beautiful’. To us all those ‘great jobs’ sound so fake. But ‘they’ truly believe when they say it.

It might to do with dichotomy of our thinking - always zero sum game (that’s why so may programmers…:-). For Russian ear ‘This is a great idea, I am not sure I like it’ is oxymoron. For American, it is completely normal and there is always a way to be positive, even for something you do not 'buy in'.