> stating the obvious

What is obvious is wildly different among people. For instance, it was obvious to me that the article was sharing some ideas freely, and those ideas are ones which are not obvious to everyone in the workplace.

“It’s obvious” is a rhetoric which puts the person who’s not getting it on defense. Usually it’s pretty counterproductive too.

> Good for you if you can create a consulting business out of stating the obvious I suppose.

In my experience, tech problems are a lot easier to solve than people problems, and a lot of things that don't go well in a project turn out to be people problems. E.g. here are a few issues I encountered in my current project at work in the last month: "their framework makes assumptions that don't apply to our code, so we reimplemented the metrics instead of trying to integrate their version" or "the data was labelled wrongly, so we had to work around that", or "this coding convention is slowing us down". Once I tried digging down, it turns out they were all people problems in disguise, and they could all be solved by "stating the obvious". Do you never encounter issues on team / across teams, where in the end it turns out a lot of issues are just people not talking to each other or misunderstanding each other? If things are too hairy, I can definitely see the value in an external consultant helping disentangle these sort of problems.

In my experience, these dont help to solve people problems. They are motivational feel good advice. In practice, they will exhaust you and dont work in the long term.

And what they actually make is to create situation in which your needs and things you want to achieve are less and less met. Or just make you look unauthentic to others - they will cease to believe your projected emotions.

Most self-help is easy to write and difficult to apply, specially if it's written in a generic matter like in a book or in a blog post.

This doesn't mean it can't be helpful. I know because some self help knowledge in the past has helped me.

It is not just difficult to apply. If you actually try to apply it and do, it setups you for fail. Because it is feel good instead of real and omits real world constraints.

Take this article - sometimes, fairly often, the "bad vibes" are a correct observation of the other persons attitude, opinions and intentions. Sometimes people are in fact hostile or cold, whether for personal, professional, fair or unfair reasons.

This part of the advice, if you apply it, is making you helpless and powerless. And conversely, it over time make you come across as manipulative person, because that is what you do majority of the time.

> where in the end it turns out a lot of issues are just people not talking to each other or misunderstanding each other?

What makes a huge difference is how you frame your interactions. If you extrinsic your interactions you're all-ways going to come away with a lack of agency, stress and/or frustration. if you intrinsic your interactions, you're going to be more in control, accountable, and over-all indifferent to other people.

For example well at work, I'm being compensated to participate in the organization to work towards its goals, wants, needs and/or desires. Those have nothing to do with me, nor do i really care about it. I will engage with people at work, colleagues and managers, how-ever if later they don't volunteer engage back - such as being cordial, I don't re-engage because I consider it to be intrusive.

Now let say you have co-workers who have a glaring communication problem. It it pretty obviously that you can do anything about it. So you engage their manager of lack of communication, and lack of professionalism. If their manager doesn't want to rectify the problem then you communicate it with your manager but at the same time be professional about it that you do not have the capacity to deliver on the deliverables within your current roles. This opens the door to opening a dialog to reviewing your remuneration or compensation package that includes the new responsibilities.

I bet these things would have worked themselves out on their own. The main thing is to have an ultra crisp vision.

> stating the obvious

If interpersonal relationships were obvious we would not need abuse laws nor CPS.

They are usually obvious, except for psychopaths and people struggling with autism. The latter is rather prominent in tech, so we see more of these issues then outside of tech.

I had selfsteem problems growing up derived from my narcissistic mother.

What am I then? Autistic or psycopath?