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One of my favorite interview questions for engineering candidates is to tell me about one thing they liked and one thing they disliked about the engineering culture at their previous company. Over the course of a few hundred interviews, this interview question has given me a sense of what good engineers look for and what they're trying to avoid. I also reflected back on my own experiences from the past six years working across Google, Ooyala, and Quora and distilled some things that a team can do to build a good engineering culture:1. Optimize for iteration speed.Quick iteration speed increases work motivation and excitement. Infrastructural and bureaucratic barriers to deploying code and launching features are some of the most common and frustrating reasons that engineers cite during interviews for why they're leaving their current companies.Organizationally, quick iteration speed means giving engineers and designers flexibility and autonomy to make day-to-day decisions without asking for permission. While I was at Google, any user-visible change to search results, even for low-traffic experiments, required Marissa Mayer's approval at a weekly UI review. Needless to say, while this allowed Google to protect its search brand, it significantly hampered innovation. Optimizing for iteration speed also means that there are well-defined processes for launching products, so that cancellations don't happen unexpectedly after significant time investment.Infrastructurally, optimizing for iteration speed means building out continuous deployment with a fast deployment process, high test coverage to reduce build and site breakages, fast unit tests so that people run them, and fast and incremental compiles and reloads to reduce development time. Continuous deployment, where commits go immediately to production, deserves a special mention. Prior to using it at Quora, it would've been hard for me to internalize that the benefits it provides toward iteration speed outweigh the risks of site breakages, at least for small engineering teams. People are more excited about features and incentivized to fix bugs because changes see live traffic quickly. It's also significantly easier to reason about and pinpoint the source of errors for a narrow window of committed code rather a week or more's worth of batched changes.Team-wise, fast iteration speed means having a set of strong leaders to help coordinate and drive team efforts. Key stakeholders in a decision need to decide effectively and commit to their choices. To borrow a phrase from Bill Walsh, a leader who coached the 49ers to 3 Super Bowls, strong leaders need to "commit, explode, recover," which means committing to a plan of attack, executing it, and then reacting to the results. A team crippled with indecisiveness will just cause individual efforts to flounder. [1]2. Push relentlessly toward automation.In his tech talk "Scaling Instagram", Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger cited "optimize for minimal operational burden" as a key lesson his 13-person team learned in scaling the product to tens of millions of users. [2] As a product grows, so does the operational burden per engineer, as measured by the ratio of users to engineers or of features to engineers. Facebook, for example, is well-known for touting scaling metrics like supporting over 1 million users per engineer. [3]Automating solutions and scripting repetitive tasks are important because they free up the engineering team to work on the actual product. Ensuring that services restart automatically if possible when they fail and that services are easily and quickly replicated at peak traffic is the only sane way to manage complexity at scale. In the short-term, there's always the tempting tradeoff of applying a quick band-aid manually rather than automating and testing a long-term fix.Etsy's motto of "measure anything, measure everything" [4] and its support of open-source monitoring and charting tools like graphite [5] and statsd [6] highlight an important aspect of automation -- that automation must be driven by data and monitoring. Without monitoring and logs to know what, how, or why something is going wrong, automation is difficult. A good follow-up motto would be to "measure anything, measure everything, and automate as much as possible."3. Build the right software abstractions.MIT Professor Daniel Jackson captures the importance of software abstractions well [7]:"Pick the right ones, and programming will flow naturally from design; modules will have small and simple interfaces; and new functionality will more likely fit in without extensive reorganization. Pick the wrong ones, and programming will be a series of nasty surprises: interfaces will become baroque and clumsy as they are forced to accommodate unanticipated interactions, and even the simplest of changes will be hard to make."Part of what allowed thousands of engineers to build scalable systems at Google is that really smart engineers like Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat built simple but versatile abstractions like MapReduce [8], SSTable [9], protocol buffers [10], and the like. Part of what allowed Facebook engineering to scale up is the focus on similarly core abstractions like Thrift [11], Scribe [12], and Hive [13]. And part of what allows designers to build products effectively at Quora is that Webnode and Livenode [14] are fairly easy to understand and build on top of.Keeping core abstractions simple and general reduces the need for custom solutions and increases the team's familiarity and expertise with the common abstractions. The growing popularity and reliability of systems like Memcached, Redis, MongoDB, etc. have reduced the need to build custom storage and caching systems. Funneling the team's focus onto a small number of core abstractions rather than fragmenting it over many ad-hoc solutions means that common libraries get more robust, monitoring gets more intelligent, performance characteristics get better understood, and tests get more comprehensive. All of this helps contribute to a simpler system with reduced operational burden.4. Develop a focus on high code quality with code reviews.Maintaining a high-quality code base increases the productivity of the entire engineering team. Cleaner code is easier to reason about, quicker to develop on, more amenable to changes, and less susceptible to bugs. A healthy code review process makes this possible.Establishing a process for timely code reviews, whether pre-commit or post-commit, improves code quality in a few ways. First, the peer pressure of knowing that someone will be reviewing your code and that committing poorly written code will likely let down your teammates is a strong deterrent against hacky, unmaintainable, or untested code. Second, code reviews provide opportunities for the code reviewer and author to learn from each other to write better code.If the code reviews are easily accessible to other members of the engineering team, then the reviews also bring along the benefits of a) increasing accountability for reviewing code in a timely manner, b) allowing team members -- particularly, newer ones -- to model off of others' good code reviews, and c) speeding up the dissemination of best coding practices.Counter-arguments that nimble teams don't have time to spend on code reviews ignore the technical debt that can easily accumulate from poorly written code. Ooyala, in its very early startup days, used to optimize for cranking out as many features as possible, with an absence of code reviews; the result was that while the initial product may have gone to market more quickly, the resultant code became painful to modify, and we spent over a year just rewriting brittle code to eliminate technical debt.Google, at its size, does pre-commit code reviews for all code, but smaller teams don't need to be as comprehensive or strict, and not all code needs to be reviewed with the same rigor. Ooyala later adopted post-commit reviews over email for core or risky changes while I was there. At Quora, we currently conduct all code reviews in Phabricator [15], mostly post-commit, and apply different standards for model or controller code and view code; for sensitive code or for code from newer engineers, we'll either do pre-commit reviews or try to review them within a few hours of the code being submitted.5. Maintain a respectful work environment.Respect among peers forms the foundation for any type of open communication. A place where people feel comfortable challenging each other's ideas is one where sound ideas get forged through debate. A place where people easily get offended is one where crucial feedback gets withheld.In 1948, Alex Osborn outlined the familiar brainstorming approach that's been popular in work environments for the past few decades, where participants come together, set aside criticism and negative feedback, and collectively pool together creative ideas without fear of being judged. [16] Respectful deferment of judgment is key to this type of brainstorming session. Recent psychology research has started to overturn Osborn's approach, suggesting that encouraging debate in brainstorming sessions actually helps to avoid groupthink and generates more effective ideas. In light of this research, a respectful environment becomes even more critical so that attacks are directed toward ideas rather than being ad-hominem. [17]Engineering often spans a wide range of areas (systems, machine learning, product, etc.) and not everyone has the same expertise in each area. A strong team in fact probably ought to have individuals who are uniquely strong in certain areas even if they end up being deficient in others. This sometimes makes it tricky for say, a systems engineer to evaluate the proficiency of a product engineer, but it's important in a healthy engineering culture to respect those differences and to not judge solely based on your own strengths.6. Build shared ownership of code.While it's natural for individuals to become proficient in various parts of the code base or infrastructure, no one person should feel that they own or are the sole maintainer of any one piece. While having individuals become experts that own certain areas for a year or more might increase effectiveness in the short run, this approach ends up hurting in the long run.Organizationally, shared code ownership provides three benefits. First, keeping the bus factor [18] greater than one relieves stress from the maintainer and reduces risk for the team in case the maintainer leaves. It also makes it difficult for that one person to take worry-free time off. I sure don't miss the days when I was the sole maintainer of Ooyala's logs processor and got texted by pager alerts while hiking on volcanoes in Hawaii.Second, shared ownership empowers engineers who aren't knee-deep in the particular area to contribute fresh insights. It frees engineers from the sense that they're stuck on certain projects and encourages them to work on a diversity of projects, which helps to keep work interesting and boosts employee learning and motivation. In the long run, it reduces organizational risk that some engineer feels stagnated and decides to leave. [19]Third, shared ownership also sets the foundation for having multiple team members swarm (a technique from agile development) together on a high-priority problem when necessary to finish a strategic goal more quickly. With siloed ownership, the burden typically falls on one or two people.One mistake that many engineering organizations make too early on is dividing the entire team into subteams with tech leads when the team's still small. Subteams build walls of ownership that reduce incentive to cross those walls, since individuals will likely be assessed by their subteam's objectives. Ooyala had subteams while I was there, and one thing I missed out on was the opportunity to work with some folks on other teams; they've since adopted an agile development process with a much larger focus on shared code ownership that I've heard has made large strides in work happiness and productivity. One aspect of Quora that I've loved is that we've emphasized projects over teams, and I've had an opportunity to work on projects ranging from user growth, machine learning, moderation tools, recommendations, analytics, site speed, and spam detection.7. Invest in automated testing.Unit test coverage and some degree of integration test coverage is the only scalable way of managing a large codebase with a large group of people without constantly breaking the build or the product. Automated testing provides confidence in and meaningful protection against large-scale refactorings that are required to improve code quality. In the absence of rigorous automated testing, the time required for manual testing either by the engineering team or by an outsourced testing team easily becomes prohibitive, and it's easy to fall into a culture of fear for improving a piece of code just because it might break.In practice, automated testing is a requirement for making continuous deployment work as the team grows. Codebase size grows over time as the product grows, but average familiarity with the codebase by team members decreases as new people join. Testing and validation are most easily done by the original code authors when the code is fresh in their minds than by those who try to modify the code months or years later. Encouraging a strong unit testing culture shifts the validation responsibility toward the authors.8. Allot 20% time.Gmail found its roots in Paul Buchheit's 20% project, and he hacked together the first version in a single day. [20] Google News, Google Transit, and Google Suggest also started and launched as 20% projects. I used 20% time while at Google to write a python framework that made it significantly easier to build search page demos. While Google's 20% time may be less productive now than during the early days of the company [21], the notion of letting engineers spend 20% of their time working on something not on their product map remains a cradle of innovation for smaller engineering organizations.Ooyala didn't officially have 20% time while I was there, but I took some anyway and wrote a command-line build tool for Flex and Actionscript that sped up the team's build times, just as Adobe's Flex Builder tool chain started to degrade, and the tool's still in use today even though the engineering team has nearly tripled in size. Atlassian adopted 20% time after experimenting it for year. [22] A variation of 20% time that Facebook's fond of and that Ooyala added later is periodic hackathons -- all-night events where the rule is that you can work on anything except your normal project. [23]Top-down approaches to product planning, while necessary for focusing the overall direction of the company, can't account to for the multitude of ideas that might arise from engineers closer to the ground. As long as engineers are accountable for their 20% time and focus on what can be high-impact changes, these projects can lead to large steps forward in progress. Without official 20% time, it's still possible but much more difficult for engineers and designers to try out crazy ideas -- the dedicated ones basically have to find weekends or vacation days to do it.9. Build a culture of learning and continuous improvement.Learning and being sufficiently challenged are requirements for what psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a state of "flow", where someone is so completely focused and motivated by what they're doing that they even lose track of time. [24] The direct and immediate feedback loop provided by faster iteration cycles is another requirement.Weekly tech talks provide forums for engineers to share their designs or what they've built, creating an opportunity for engineers to take pride in their work and for the team to learn more outside their immediate scope of work. Documenting processes internally like how a email service works or how to make ranking changes to a search service also empowers engineers to learn and explore new things on their own, nicely complementing 20% time. At Quora, we do this by running an internal instance of Quora where we ask product- and development-related questions.A corollary of building a culture of learning is focusing on mentoring and training to make sure that everyone has the basic algorithms, systems, and product skills necessary for success. The more an engineering organization grows and the more effort gets spent on recruiting (particularly college recruiting), the more effort needs to be invested into mentoring and training. It might seem burdensome for a single mentor to spend an hour per day for a new hire's first 4 weeks on the job, but that investment represents less than 1% of the total time that hire will spend in a year and has significantly high leverage in determining whether the person is set up for success.10. Hire the best.Hiring the best is the foundation for many of the other philosophies listed. It's hard to respect someone if you think they're a B-level engineer. It's hard to give someone autonomy in product development if you don't trust their product instincts. It's hard to recognize the right abstraction to build without enough engineering experience. It's easy to fall into a trap of building something complex without other smart people to challenge your ideas and drive you toward simplicity.There's a saying around Silicon Valley, coined by Steve Jobs, that "A players hire A players. B players hire C players." [25,26] Focusing on recruiting and hiring the right people is hard but critical to effectively growing an engineering organization. Yishan Wong, who previously was an engineering manager and director at Facebook, argued that hiring has to be the number one priority for everyone in the engineering organization, not just for managers, but for engineers as well. [27] He also quite rightly points out the difference between "hiring the best" and "hiring the best candidate that you've interviewed."In the early days of Ooyala, we were so overwhelmed with the queue of inbound customer work that we nearly caved in to lowering our hiring bar so that we could hire enough people to get all our work done. I'm glad that we didn't, as the technical debt from lower quality code and weaker engineers on the team would've ended up hurting the team and the product.Building a good engineering culture is certainly a lot of work, but the resulting work environment is well worth it.Looking for more best practices in engineering? Download a free, sample chapter of my book, The Effective Engineer. It's based on extensive interviews with engineering leaders at the top tech companies around Silicon Valley and packed with lessons, stories, and actionable insights on how to make you and your team more effective.--------[1] Bill Walsh. The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership http://books.google.com/books?id=shUB6M9IzZcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=bill+walsh+score+takes+care+of+itself&hl=en&sa=X&ei=MA-gT96-LeaJiAKXwJSmAQ&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=explode&f=false[2] Scaling Instagram.http://www.scribd.com/doc/89025069/Mike-Krieger-Instagram-at-the-Airbnb-tech-talk-on-Scaling-Instagram[3] Scaling Facebook to 500 Million Users and Beyond. https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=409881258919[4] Measure Anything, Measure Everything. http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-everything/[5] http://graphite.wikidot.com/[6] https://github.com/etsy/statsd[7] Daniel Jackson. Software Abstractions: Logic, Language, and Analysis http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-abstractions[8] http://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce.html[9] What is an SSTable in Google's internal infrastructure?[10] http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/[11] https://thrift.apache.org/[12] https://github.com/facebook/scribe[13] http://hive.apache.org/[14] http://www.quora.com/Shreyes-Seshasai/Posts/Tech-Talk-webnode2-and-LiveNode[15] http://phabricator.org/[16] Alex Osborn. Your Creative Power. http://www.amazon.com/Your-Creative-Power-Alex-Osborn/dp/1569460558[17] Groupthink. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all[18] What is "bus number" and why do you want it to be greater than 1?[19] How do experienced engineers at startups avoid stagnation due to the overabundance of operational issues?[20] Communicating with Code. http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/communicating-with-code.html[21] How does Google (company)’s Google Innovation Time Off (20% time) policy work in practice?[22] http://www.atlassian.com/company/careers/life[23] Inside Facebook’s final Palo Alto Hackathon. http://gigaom.com/2011/12/16/exclusive-inside-facebooks-final-palo-alto-hackathon/[24] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)[25] What is an "A Player"? Steve Jobs is always emphasizing that “A Players” only want to work with “A Players.” What are the attributes of said people?[26] What I learned from Steve Jobs. http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2011/10/what-i-learned-from-steve-jobs.html#axzz1unynLRLT[27] http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/engineering-management-hiring.html

A2A, thank you! I hope you all like long, drawn out answers.From least favourite to favourite:1. Season 2Even Breaking Bad’s worst season is still a work of art. My main gripes with Season 2 is I hate the conclusion to the season. I find the plane crash to be over-the-top and cheap, compared to the other season finales. All the other seasons have a powerful and impactful ending, with far smaller scale tragedy, that ties in better with the plot. All of the other parts of Season 2 - the introduction of Saul Goodman and Gus Fring, the rise and fall of Jane Margolis, 4 Days Out, Walt truly coming into his own as a criminal - makes it a fantastic season. But the finale always sits in my mind.2. Season 1Season 1 sets the groundwork for the entire series, and it is of course very important to the overall success of Breaking Bad. I love it, and it holds a very special place in my heart. However, I think anyone who has watched the full series would say it doesn’t hold up against the masterpieces later in the show. You get to see Walt in his mundane life as a family man and teacher, it tugs on your heartstrings and says that YES, Walt is this good man who is doing this for his family. He is doing what he needs to do. It juxtaposes this with Jesse’s idiocy and criminal aspirations, which are strongest in this season.These are probably the two reasons I dislike the season more than Season 3–5. Walt as Heisenberg is an amazing character, one that powers the show ahead and makes it something special. Walt as Walt? A little bland. Jesse as he is in Season 1… he is a dumbass, straight up. He is my favourite character of the show, but even I can’t help but roll my eyes at him all through the seven episode run. Both Walt and Jesse’s character development over the series is what makes Breaking Bad great. Characters need a starting point if they are to develop, and for that I thank Season 1, but gratefully move forwards.3. Season 3This is an incredibly special season to me as it is when I started watching the show. It is a great season, with some extremely important plot points. Walt and Jesse are working for Gus, who has become a major character. Mike is helping to run the show and setting groundwork for his relationship with Jesse. Jesse has gotten clean and is trying to put his best foot forward, but continuously fails. Walt becomes increasingly more conniving and criminal. Hank is less of the happy-go-lucky comic relief, and becomes a very troubled character. I would say of all the seasons, this one has the most important character development moving forward. It firmly cements Walt as Heisenberg, Jesse as a tragic character with a heart of gold, and the addition of Skylar into the criminal enterprise. Characters make choices this season that seal their fates. This is why I love season 3, and controversial opinion - why I love Fly.The finale is also so understated, but meaningful. It is everything Season 2’s finale was missing. People get shot and killed almost every episode of the show, but having Jesse murder Gale at point blank range, knowing the impact that would have on him and the turn for this character shows that you don’t need to have some big flashy finale to be memorable.4. Season 4When I watched this season, I genuinely thought it was perfect. And really, I still do. The only reason I place Season 5 above it is because of Ozymandias and the series finale, and the fact that they absolutely nailed it. Season 4 is incredible for so many reasons. You get to know Gus and his motivations further, it shows Walt toppling Gus’s throne and cementing himself as the alpha kingpin, it documents Jesse’s demise into sadness and mental health struggles. Not to mention, the finale is one of the most exciting moments in television history.5. Season 5Again, this is a perfect season of television. Every single episode, every moment, every piece of dialogue. Vince Gilligan and his team of writers take every single plot line, and tie it up with a nice, big, blue sky bow. This season originally aired as two parts, and so the “mid-season finale” of Hank discovering that Walt is Heisenberg left quite an impact. Even beyond that, it features moments like Mike, Hank, and Walt’s deaths, the fantastic episode that is Dead Freight and gets my blood pumping every time, the episode Ozymandias that you’ll find at the top of every “Best Television Episode of All Time” article, and the finale you’ll find at the top of every “Best Television Finale of All Time” list. It is perfect, and there is nothing more to say.

Update 13/12/2017: Blaming them is a solution. See new section at the end.Update 12/11/2015: I have updated this with another abstract from my original work on Sensual manipulation / Vocal manipulation and how to overcome itUpdate 31/10/2015: I have another genius, unique solution towards the bottom of the page under "Narcissistic communication", which might just solve the unresolved problem of communicating with narcissists across the world!-----I am really excited that I can answer this question. I think I have a genius, unique answer and I would like you to try it and see the results.This is my own finding and it hasn't been published anywhere. Quora users will be the first to read about it. Indulge!There is an unknown and unrealised secret about humans which somehow you NEVER NOTICED and NOBODY TOLD YOU. This secret is that some human behaviours have an effect in your subconscious without even realising! Literally, your whole thinking process changes just by being triggered via certain actions.Humans are more perceptive than they realise. They read each other in many ways instinctively and change their thoughts based on what they perceive without realising.Why someone cannot tell their exact subconscious thoughts is similar to Godel's first theorem of incompleteness, which states that "there are true statements expressible in its language that are unprovable within the system". In other words, humans cannot know what they are thinking subconsciously in their mind because they are inside that system. However, the conscious part receives the thoughts and they sometimes seem to come almost out of nowhere.One particular mechanism which people use to communicate and sends messages directly to the subconscious without people realising is THE STARE. When people face each other in the eyes, a change in their behaviour is formed. This little mechanism alone has a massive influence in everyday life.When someone faces another in the eyes, it is a direct signal to the other person and they react instinctively. If the other person is perceived as a threat, it triggers the survival instinct to get ready to a fight or surrender. If it is perceived as a friend, it triggers the emotional system to get ready to self-sacrifice and give.How this decision is made I will not reveal fully at this stage.Narcissism is related to lack of parental affection during toddler years. Toddlers up to the age of about 4 have an unusually constant stare. This triggers this mechanism to the mother's emotions and she feels like she should self-sacrifice for her baby and give to it. Notice toddlers and you will see this continuous stare happening.Narcissists, as well as psychopaths have had some kind of problem with this affection. But whatever the reason, they employ this stare all the time against their victims. They will literally stare at the person in the eyes for long without doing anything. Being around a person who has emotion or empathy, this will instantly trigger their self-sacrifice mode and they will be unable to think with their own cognition, or resist to the narcissist's requests and unreasonable behaviour.The stare works like brainwashing on others. The actual mechanism is triggered as follows - you can do it as an experiment with 3 friends. 2 will perform it and one will be an obsever who will not interfere. The 2 performers have to stare at each other in the eye for 5 minutes. Then notice how their behaviour has changed. Chances are they will feel love for each other but this isn't always the case. Try with man vs man, man vs woman or woman vs woman and see the results.So in short:- The staring mechanism is one humans have as a leftover from their animalistic nature- The staring mechanism triggers the subconscious and causes a significant change in behaviour without someone realising- The stare can make someone self-sacrifice to another.- The stare works like brainwashing or hypnotising. It makes people self-sacrifice, fall in love or fight!- The stare blurs their cognition and they cannot fight back!- The recipient cannot realise that they have been drawn into this mode because it all happens subconsciously. All they see is how their behaviour changes when the commands are sent into the conscious part of the brain.- The narcissists use this stare against their victims to hypnotise them, either he/she knows it or not.- The victims cannot realise what happened to them. They get confused that they become helpless and they cannot explain it! Sometimes it triggers enormous fear and people don't know how or why!!!! The fear remains long after the narcissist is gone.- It is almost impossible to realise the brainwashing and resist it, even hours later.Ask any person who has been with a narcissist or psychopath and they will say they always remember THE STARE!So this is the big trick.. How does one act against a narcissist so as to avoid this attack?This the most simple solution:-> WEAR DARK OR REFLECTOR SUNGLASSESFunny? Mad? It is how it works! Trapping this simple mechanism makes a big difference.Credit me, Chingo Huan Mare for my discovery.Also note that looking at other people in the eyes who are healthy may rebalance a person as they may find different balances against them.So no, you don't need to go through this kind of damage and deal with it with pills, medication, psychotherapy and all those complicated stories for being with a narcissist. Simply start with WEARING SUNGLASSES and see the difference.Once the narcissist cannot hypnotise its victims any more, it is easier to handle them. You see, it is all about blocking all those little holes which allow them to penetrate the subconscious and trigger all sorts of emotions and behaviours.This hypnosis also works on video. Anyone who has come across narcissists will perceive the feeling immediately. If you haven't realised when you come across one, here are 2. Watch them for a few minutes and see the feeling you receive. It is THE EYES. They make someone feel stuck or give a creepy feeling.Sam Vaknin, psychopath/narcissistMichio Kaku, narcissistThere are more such holes to the subconscious which are not known and realised and I will reveal more in the future.Best of luckUpdate 27/10/2015Why don't most people didn't figure these interactions out? The secrets of hypervigilance and hypersensitivityThe secret lies in a state called "hypervigilance". People who have gone through situations of extreme danger become hypervigilant automatically as they adjust to that environment. During hypervigilance, the sensory perception system works much harder than before. It is as if the body sends all its energy there and it so they perceive with their sense better than previously and than other people can. Their sight, hearing, smell improve, and maybe taste and touch as well. It is as if they have new skills, or new "superpowers". Imagine this as the heroes in the film X-men.Hypervigilant peopleAre able to understand the eye communication better. They can spot aggressors, illness and threats easier.Are able to understand smell communicaton better. They can smell fear and illness easier.among other thingsWhat is interesting about the hypervigilant mode is that what the hypervigilant people perceive is already there also when they are not hypervigilant. What they understand in communication is simply not obvious to the non-hypervigilant. However, the impact of peoples' stare, smell, tone of voice etc. still causes subconscious changes to most people's behaviours either they detect them or not.Most people do not realise these skills fully, or further conceptualise the whole process of how human behaviour works. This requires further study, knowledge and experimentation.People who have been exposed to narcissists, psychopaths and domestic violence in a close environment have gone through PTSD and are hypervigilant / hypersensitive. Police staff may typically become hypervigilant due to the nature of their work without realising.But few of them realise that even in that state, they have some incredible new skills which their body enabled for them automatically.If you have gone through this experience of being with a narcissist or psychopath for long, check the new skills you have acquired. You can consider yourself a "superhero" like Icon, Caliban, Jim Ellison or Doctor Nemesis!IconSuperhero character by DC ComicsIcon (comics)CalibanAn X-men mutant superhero by Marvel comicsList of Marvel Comics characters: CJim EllisonThe main character in the Canadian TV series "The sentinel"The Sentinel (TV series)Doctor NemesisA superhero by Marvel ComicsDoctor NemesisYou may have to ensure that this time you are careful with how you use them because while you can spot things easier, you may still react to things without being able to control yourself, and you may have to train yourself in a different way to both understand your skills and use them effectively.Relevant linksWikipedia: HypervigilanceA guide for law enforcement officers and their families: HYPERVIGILANCEHumans Smell Fear, and It's ContagiousUpdate 31/10/2015How to defeat a narcissist part 2: ChannelingThis page has started to get a lot of views and it seems that there are a lot of people who really cannot handle narcissists, which is reasonable. Here are 2 techniques which I have developed myself:1) Make mistakes on purpose and say that you are not as good.Narcissists blame others anyway. If things go well, they want to boast for the impression to others. If things go bad, they will play pity to others. There is no justice. This method involves making mistakes, like being forgetful, letting something which the narcissist controls be messed up control, and let them handle the consequence. When they come back blaming you, say that you are not good enough and don't know how to do these things. Say that you are not good enough and make mistakes etc. Act.2) ChannelingThis is a method which I have developed based on a model which I am currently working on about narcissistic personality called "Narcissistic communication". This technique is new and does not exist in textbooks or psychiatry books. It is one more thing which, while very subtle NO ONE EVER TOLD YOU, but now you have the chance to know. It also demonstrates exactly where the problem with narcissistic personality disorder is, and why it is a disorder of personality in specific.The basis of the approach is that the main problem with narcissists is that one cannot communicate with them in terms of I and You, because the narcissist does not know of such separation. There is always a 3rd person in on the outside that they transfer things to, boast about or praise to. The narcissist seems to consider the one who speaks to them as themselves, and the other is in another place, not there.The developmental explanation seems to be that the narcissist never separated from their parents, and learnt that their close person is part of them, and the other is someone who is not there. So the solution is to use a 3rd person who has the name of the narcissist, just like the narcisst does. Instead of saying "You did this", say "John Doe did this and is very bad. He caused a mess and ...." for what they do wrong, when John Doe is the name of the narcissist. It is similar to how people speak to babies.The "channeling" technique is about transferring the blame back to the narcissist in 3rd person. When wanting to say something for oneself, one can also say that the 3rd person told them to eg "John Doe told me to...". One can also use the narcissist's words against them, such as to tell them the 3rd person told them what they just did. The point is to remove oneself as a separate person from the conversation, and channel everything the narcissist says back to them through the 3rd person, who is them.It is also important to not use "I" and "You" to refer to oneself and the narcissist directly.In other words, the 2 people in the conversation are not1) the narcissist2) the person speaking to themBut1) the narcissist and the person who speaks to them as one, as the narcissist perceives them2) an imaginary character with the narcissist's nameTo pass personal views or throw responsibility to the narcissist, channel it through this imaginary new person with the name of the narcissist.As the narcissist cannot separate between different people who they speak to and themselves, they really do not understand the above at all, nor how to handle it. This technique will most likely confuse them badly.There is a lot of space with experimentation of chanelling. One can use their own imagination to communicate further.Note:While many people recommend manipulating the narcissist and solutions to temporarily bypass them, those do not solve the issue for the narcissist or have any hope of making the narcissist be otherwise. Using this channelling method can eventually make the narcissist naturally start to realise the diffejrence in person themselves while at the same time one can achieve meaningful communication with them. It is a purely cognitive approach, such as the ones used today to treat most illnesses, and it causes an internal clash which may just force a change in the narcissistic personality.Keep in mind that current methods of treating narcissism do not exist, and this one targets exactly the root of the problem, which is with the sense of self. All the books in the world about description of narcissists sofar cannot achieve this, because the personality has not been understood well enough, nor has someone found ways to change it effectively. Psychotherapy itself takes years to work, because psychologists and therapists still work through the wrong channels and what they do has minimal effect on the narcissist and a big effect on themselves. This work is original in many respects and based on different grounds than previously.An abstract my work on the subject."Narcissistic communicationThis is a new approach which does not exist in psychology textbooks and has not been studied or published. At the present state, NPD has no known cure, no medical treatment, and no effective psychotherapeutical method. This approach remains property of the author, who is myself.PremisesBelow are some of the observed fundamentals in narcissistic communication:- Communication via submissionThe way in which narcissists communicate is by constantly making the other "submit" by being forceful and rigid. Narcissists understand only submission. If they cannot submit the other then they submit themselves. They are all right when they submit the other, and all wrong when the other submits them.- Non-separation of physically present individualsNarcissists do not perceive other individuals present. All persons are one for them. Speaking to them in first person, where different persons are referenced, is thus completely ineffective. Effectively a conversation with an I and a You, where the I is the other talker, and the You is the narcissist, as referred to from the other talker's person, are non-perceptual for the narcissist.- Communication via impressionsNarcissists understand what is right and wrong by the reactions of other people. They have no objective, internal method of assessment of events.- Communication via triangulationNarcissists communicate via triangulation. In a one-on-one narcissistic conversation there are not 2 but 3 participants: the narcissists, the other party, and a 3rd person who the narcissist uses to reference the blame to. The 3rd person may or may not be present. The narcissist uses the 3rd person to place any blame, responsibility or references to themselves.The separation of I and You in a narcissistic conversationWhen a non-narcissistic individual talks with another non-narcissistic individual, the one talking uses I to refer to themselves and You to refer to the other. There are exceptions, such as when an individual tells another what they should do. When they use You to tell the other what the other should do, they always say what the I would do, such as themselves, if they were in that situation. Nevertheless, this exception will not be discussed here since narcissist lack this ability, which is the result of what is called empathy (putting oneself in the shoes of another).When the active talker becomes the other, the I and You refer to different people. As an example, for 2 participants A and B, if the active talker is A, than the "I" refers to participant A and the "You" refers to participant B. Now if participant B starts talking, the "I" refers to participant B and the "You" refers to participant A.While the above mechanism works naturally for non-narcissists, it does not work so for narcissists. Narcissists do not want the I and You to appear as separate people, and will constantly argue in every attempt of this separation. The real "other" talker for the narcissist seems to be the 3rd person they use for triangulation. The person in front of them is the one they want to receive impressions from.In a one-on-one conversation between a narcissist A, and a non-narcissist B, the narcissist perceives A and B as one person with the same opinion by default. The narcissist includes a person C who is the one who may have a different opinion than the narcissist. The narcissist expects only to see impressions made from B about the different opinions of C.Narcissistic modellingAssume a one-one one conversation with 2 Real people R(A) and R(B), where R(A) is a narcissist, and R(B) is a non-narcissist. The 2 persons Perceived by participants in the conversation are P(A) and P(B).For a non-narcissist it stands that:P(A) = R(A)P(B) = R(B)P(C) = R(C)From the non-narcissist R(B)’s perception, R(B) converses with the narcissist R(A) so that P(A) reconciles with P(B), while maintaining that R(A) ≠ R(B). At times when P(A) = P(B) either R(A) or R(B) may change their approach.The narcissist converses via the method of triangulation, where he always includes a third real person R(C) to cover up for his misperception of persons.For a narcissist:P(A) = R(A) = R(B)P(B) = R(C)From the narcissist R(A)’s perception, he considers by default that R(A) = R(B), and perceives both as P(A). The narcissist can only perceive P(B) as different real person. The narcissist attempts to reconcile P(A) with P(B), while maintaining that R(A) ≠ R(C). At times it may appear that P(A) = P(B) which in effect may change R(A).End of abstract."More details about the "I" and "me" communication in toddlersUsing the Third Person - How Toddlers Talk About ThemselvesA study on the effect of talking in 3rd personThe Psychological Case for Talking in the Third PersonUpdate 12/11/2015This is another abstract of my work on narcissistic communication.Sensual manipulationIt is said that narcissists are “emotionally abusive”, and use “emotional manipulation” tactics – either willingly or not. The same is said for psychopaths. These statements are false. Narcissists have a problem with regulation of their own emotion. They have shallow or no emotion. How psychologists and narcissist specialists speak put together these 2 ideas really is to wonder!The reality in the term “emotional manipulation” is that they damage those who experience emotion by forcing them to get into an emotional, trusting and submissive state as the only means to push forward anything they say and do.How the narcissist damages others - Constantly inducing cognitive dissonanceThe actual way in which the narcissist damages others is via continuously inducing Cognitive dissonance to them via his denial and contradictions which result from their confused personality, and forcing continuous stress to them in the interactions."In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, performs an action that is contradictory to one or more beliefs, ideas or values, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values."Sensual manipulation & The adjusted sensory system of a narcissistNarcissists have conflicts in the overall function of their personality, their senses have been automatically adjusted to enable communication with others. As manipulation starts with the senses, what they do should is sensual manipulation.Narcissists and those they interact with aren’t always aware about their sensual interaction.Narcissists appear to have had their senses adjusted through the practical experience of interacting with others, and observing where others make way for them and where not, without really putting together why they do.Equally, people who have been with narcissists have had a change in their senses. Their hearing is changed, and they respond to different tone voices with the appropriate behavior. They have been tuned to become submissive based on certain tones of voice.An example of the unconscious effect of hearing a voice to someone’s emotional stateA practical example of how hearing a voice unconsciously affects the emotional state of a person is from radio station announcers. It is known that some announcers are particularly popular because of their “smooth voice”. That “smooth voices” makes the audience feel relaxed, irrelevant of what the announcer may be saying, and whether it is in fact true, false or absolutely irrational. This is because the announcer's voice changes people’s emotional state to a relaxed and trusting one.The changeability of the voice is a factor for the ability to manipulateThe ability to manipulate others vocally is in the changeability of the voice. If one couldn’t change their voice, they wouldn’t be able to manipulate. In a specific example, someone like Mr Stephen Hawking, who uses a constant, computer generated digitized voice, would not be able to manipulate someone with it.The voice and the narcissistNarcissists also use the voice to stimulate the required emotional state of the other person. They use a soft voice to appear trusting, or a hard angry voice to submit the other person. People who have been with narcissists have become particularly responsive to that tone of voice, and it unconsciously changes their emotional state.The soft voice is also generally continuous, with no gaps, "errs" and "uhms". It makes narcissists appear to be in pain, or very caring, trustworthy people. However, people who are so demonstrate other signs in body language or in their actual talk or way of expressing language which demonstrate so. Narcissists don’t.How to defeat a narcissist given the aboveTo overcome a narcissist, notice how others' tone of voice change you, and how purely certain kinds of voice put you into different emotional states and becoming submissive.Start to be more aware of this if speaking to a narcissist, particularly when they do their "soft voice". Focus on the narcsissist's practical actions and the logical content of what they say, and in respect to their actions instead of their voice. That moment they are inducing cognitive dissonance to you, but this inconsistency between their tone of voice and what they actually say and have done should not happen any more, so it should not work. Focus on who you are functionally within the spoken context, who they are, and whether they are contributing or not. If you remember this it may help you keep your composure and slowly retrain yourself to react better to it.---In summary, the simple tactics to defeat a narcissist which I suggest are:1) Wear dark or reflector sunglasses.2) Make mistakes and messes and let the narcissist sort them out, and agree when blamed from the narcissist.3) Channel the conversation through a 3rd person who has the name of the narcissist.4) Study the effects of tones of voices and learn to not be affected by itOptionally5) Give the therapists and psychologists a box of tissues and some Xanax, and wish them good luck.Relevant informationIf you have spent a lot of time with a narcissist as a relative/partner and have developed PTSD/depression/anxiety, also read a simple solution:How can I overcome anxiety?A key to remember about Narcissists and Psychopaths is perfectly summarized in this song by the the American musician Henry Rollins.Copyright © 2015 by Chingo Huan MareCopyright NoticePermission is granted to copy (unmodified) all or part of the documents making up "How do I defeat a narcissist" for personal, non-commerical use, as long as the copyright message (Copyright © 2015 by Chingo Huan Mare) is maintained on each document or part.Update 13/12/2017Blaming the narcissists works. Narcissists cause a ton of problems. They don’t fulfil their responsibilities and duties. They don’t do their work. They are often very badly skilled at most things they do.But the primary problem in interacting with narcissists is that they blame others for their own problems, the consequences of their own problems, as well as imaginary problems that they make up with magical thinking.Their blaming is what does the most damage. Once you stop them from blaming, it is possible to tackle the rest of the problems they cause.Anything they will come to say either is a direct blame, or is blame-based, or a threat. So it is easy to know that in advance, that they will come with a threat or blame anytime.To defeat themAs soon as they talk, blame them about something of their own. Do not consider what they say. Nail them in blame as much as possible, for anything they have done. Keep blaming them until they are in a corner and start playing the poor person, saying “ok ok why are you reacting like this”. Then is the moment where they switch to playing “victim” and enter denial, to pretend that “nothing happened”.Once done, save the blaming reason for next time. They rarely fix what they were blamed for. So next time they come at you, you can keep nailing them with the last blame again. If more come up, save those too. Save the 3 blames that you won well with.As they do not fix the problem you blame them for, the blames will last to reuse for a long time. You can also blame them worse next time. You can increase the blame by saying that you told them last time and they still do it.Anytime they come up with something, start on the blame you won with best. Don’t let them breathe. Blame unstoppably.This should stop them from harassing you.As for their own blames - dissolve them with calling out the way they present them. Their sentences are incomplete, and do not make sense. They look like blames because they have a personally blaming tone, but lack content. If they describe what they are trying to talk about, it is always immediately obvious that they are wrong.To dissolve their blames, say something like “What the f*** does that mean? Make a full sentence! Get your head to work.”. Soon they will stop talking. If they make a whole sentence, then it starts becoming clear that they are making things up and are out of touch with reality. Keep repeating “What the f*** does that mean? Make a full sentence! What does it have to do with me?”.It will block them from talking, and since their blames are fake, you win. Then they go into “poor person” mode again, playing the victim, and denial.Then, blame them for something they did against you - pick one of the tons.Do not threaten them with what you will do against them for what they do. They get even worse and reply as if it is a game - like psychopaths do - with something along the lines of “so what?”. They fight back and try to insult you. Whatever action you take against them, do it behind their back. Do not tell them or warn them. If you want to go to the police to report them for harassment, or take any other measures against them, just do it whenever you feel free and comfortable. When speaking to the narcissists, simply blame them mercilessly.In the blame, present yourself as the innocent eg “I was sitting here typing this answer. You came in and started harassing me with your problems. And you do x and y and z. You are off your head. etc”.The narcissist may also react with stonewalling, which is that they stop talking. They do that to try and consume you more, to let you talk so as to cancel out what you say. While they do not speak, you can increase the blame by adding more details to it about what they did wrong and how. Do not hear their answers or expect to make sense of them. Alternatively, throw one good blame, and then leave them.Repeat. Do not feel sorry for them. It is a throat-cutting battle, not a game. If you blame them enough, they may crack. If not, at least they will not be able to harass you.Read more:Which part of the brain of a person do psychopaths and narcissists attack?Can a narcissist feel guilt?How does a misdiagnosis of Complex-PTSD impact the victims of those with NPD?What is it like to have complex post traumatic disorder (CPTSD)?