I think something that really helped with this was realizing that fundamentally it did not really matter if I won an argument, especially in a workplace. Because really I was just giving my opinion, and it's not like I was smarter than anyone else.
There is no technical disagreement in basically any context that if were to "lose" that would result in my life getting worse. I'm sure other people may feel differently, but this reframes these arguments as what they should be - technical discussions, and if a person is particularly passionate I can use that as a sign to trust them.
Because really I was just giving my opinion, and it's not like I was smarter than anyone else.
I think even in your proposed situation, "losing" an argument doesn't actually mean that your being on the hook for overnight support of a system is a problem, or should make you feel differently about the stakes for that argument. Mostly because you may very well be wrong. Or because actually both sides of the argument are valid and the actual impact of the decision comes out in the wash. Or because this decision basically doesn't matter compared to the big chunk-o-tech-debt that actually causes all of your outages. Or, or, or...
Lots of decisions in software engineering matter quite a lot. But that doesn't mean that winning an argument is in and of itself particularly important. If you lose, and you were right, and you can clearly see how your on call pages have gone up dramatically since that decision, then you have a remarkably clear case for reversing the decision. And if all of that happens without you appearing vindictive, because you didn't die on the original hill, then maybe in the future you'll end up having your opinion respected somewhat more. And if not, then maybe the problem is that your team doesn't respect your opinion — which is rather independent from whether you're losing all of your arguments.
I've had a mixture for sure: times when my life would get worse if I lost, and times when it felt that way but I was just over-reacting or already burnt out, or other kinds of team dysfunction like poor ownership.
Tech work can be a double-edged sword: we often get a lot more power to choose what we work on than other kinds of workers, but we also get a lot of variance in the kinds of work we might be expected to do. Like that time my employer started a lawsuit with Amazon and decided that meant everyone should migrate to Azure. That's still in my job description, but a migration like that could be soul-crushing. I left for unrelated reasons, but I was very fortunate to have the ability to leave and still pay rent, unlike many other fields.
Isn't that exactly the attitude from the article and what the person you're replying to are critiquing?
If you assume you're right in every conversation, then yes, every decision feels vital. But if your colleagues are roughly as smart as you but coming at things from different perspectives (which seems likely, statistically speaking) then you're probably going to be wrong roughly as often as you're going to be right. Irritatingly, you can't tell in advance which times are which, so it makes sense to be humble about all your opinions because you never know which ones are actually going to turn out to be bad ideas.
(The corollary of this is that you're going to be right roughly as often as you're going to be wrong, which means that it makes sense to also be confident about all your opinions because you don't know which ones will turn out to be good ideas either.)
Of course, this implies that you trust your team reasonably well, which is what most of the article expands on (and well!): how you can build trust in a team, how you can address conflicts in a healthy way, etc. If you don't have that trust, then maybe it is easier to just assume you're right in every case and then you're back to square one. But you're also going to be less effective now, because everyone in the team is going to be vehemently arguing for decisions that, roughly half the time, are going to be wrong.
But if your colleagues are roughly as smart as you but coming at things from different perspectives (which seems likely, statistically speaking)
When I am having work conversations, I'm having work conversations with specific people, not the statistical average of all developers. There are some people I know I can trust to have well-thought rationales behind their decisions, and some who absolutely do not have this trust.
The fact is 99.9999% of technical disagreements have absolutely no effect on the success of a company, and if your opinion mattered that much to effect things so dramatically you'd be in a position where you could just tell people what to do
Hmm, that doesn't really match what i've seen in this industry. I've worked on companies where bad technical decisions negatively affected products, sometimes even completely tanking them, and ending in the eventual downfall of the company.
These were small-ish startups, yes. And there were other factors that contributed to the failure of the company, sure. But let's not dismiss the disastrous effect that a terrible technical decision can have. I mean a decision like "let's allocate most of our development efforts on a complete rewrite of our main web front-end [which is already working and generating revenue, btw] into a 'modern' stack using React and GraphQL because <reasons>".
Given that i've seen these kind of problems first-hand more than once, i'd say your estimation of 99.9999% of technical disagreements having no effect on the success of a company is off. Otherwise, my experience would be an extreme outlier.
This isn’t what I really said though. Are you saying that one of your coworkers, a person on your team you had equal footing with, said that everyone should participate in this complete rewrite? That doesn’t seem likely, or if it is a signal of a completely dysfunctional organization that would have failed in due course anyway. What seems more likely is that a tech lead, a person who can make decisions and disregard your good opinion, unilaterally decided this
There is a huge range between a coworker's disagreement having "absolutely no effect" and them having the power to dictate what the whole development team does. In reality, most organizations will be in some middle ground between those two absurd extremes. Which was kinda my point.
To make it more explicit: i think we developers often have more power to influence and change things than the culture of our companies wants us to believe. I have refused to do things on technical grounds or moral being a junior developer, and wasn't fired for it. And in some cases those things were not done by anyone else afterwards (even though the person who told me to, my boss, was technically capable of doing them. And in other cases, like the stupid rewrite i mentioned above, i didn't act, even if i disagreed strongly. And i regretted not having done so, because i could, and i think there was a probability of avoiding disaster.
I don’t disagree with you, and I don’t really think I made this clear but I’m talking about technical disagreements with coworkers who are roughly the same level as you on a team
Ahh, thanks for the clarification. I think i understand your point better now. And yeah, i kind of agree with that. Your first post on this thread was more in that same line, and TBH was much more sensible to me. I think i knee-jerk reacted to the other post which i replied to.
Remember that friend from Cisco I stopped talking to? I had been thinking about messaging her again for like a solid year, but I really struggled to overcome the shame of getting into all those pointless arguments and ruining a friendship as a result. Would she be holding a grudge of her own? Would she even see my message?
I recently went through this process several times, with fairly random people I felt deep in my heart that I had wronged long ago. Unilaterally they said "oh yeah, I remember you. you're worried about old beef? what old beef? lmao it's not a problem, I always felt you were a kinda sweet guy. nice to hear from you!"
I always enjoy when people reference materials where their concepts and ideas come from. I've looked into some of the reference material and put a few on order to read through since they seem to resonate with me.
I have a thought that I hope doesn't come across too rejective or something. But I have a feeling that present day management and company structures - also outside of our industry - are extremely flawed. I think that wrong ideas have been picked up at spread. Productivity should be high, everyone is burned out but nobody has actual solutions but grand speeches. And I get it it's all you can do, of the structure is a certain way but it has effects on how people work and eg make decisions.
I think that's something that has to be accepted because just saying "others do the same" doesn't mean it's the approach is any good. It seems to work better or worse for some and all that but I think to a degree we drifted into a world where work and companies are semi religious things in that we do things cause they make sense or create benefit but kind of arbitrary numbers are their own goal which is pretty silly. And that I think includes the winners. Given how people spend money when they are rich I think few are genuinely happy. They might be addicted to some stuff and therefore might think so, but I doubt there is much fulfilling for many of them.
I think it's time to reevaluate these things and I tbh the post does that, even when it might not be the primary goal.
See if you can find stuff written about Morning Star. They're a tomato growing and packaging company, of all things. Something like 500 employees with, supposedly, zero hierarchy. People do the job they want to do, or which needs doing. Sorta unimaginable, but the fact that it exists at all gives me hope.
Just a fun aside about that Colosseum painting: the spectators are giving the thumbs down -- the same thumb-based life-or-death referendum seen in the movie Gladiator.
They made one small change for the movie though: they made "thumbs down" the signal for death in the movie, while in ancient Rome thumbs down meant "no do not kill that person, they have fought honorably".
mplant | a month ago
I think something that really helped with this was realizing that fundamentally it did not really matter if I won an argument, especially in a workplace. Because really I was just giving my opinion, and it's not like I was smarter than anyone else.
There is no technical disagreement in basically any context that if were to "lose" that would result in my life getting worse. I'm sure other people may feel differently, but this reframes these arguments as what they should be - technical discussions, and if a person is particularly passionate I can use that as a sign to trust them.
Student | a month ago
If you’re on the hook for overnight support of a system you might feel differently.
smoores | a month ago
I think even in your proposed situation, "losing" an argument doesn't actually mean that your being on the hook for overnight support of a system is a problem, or should make you feel differently about the stakes for that argument. Mostly because you may very well be wrong. Or because actually both sides of the argument are valid and the actual impact of the decision comes out in the wash. Or because this decision basically doesn't matter compared to the big chunk-o-tech-debt that actually causes all of your outages. Or, or, or...
Lots of decisions in software engineering matter quite a lot. But that doesn't mean that winning an argument is in and of itself particularly important. If you lose, and you were right, and you can clearly see how your on call pages have gone up dramatically since that decision, then you have a remarkably clear case for reversing the decision. And if all of that happens without you appearing vindictive, because you didn't die on the original hill, then maybe in the future you'll end up having your opinion respected somewhat more. And if not, then maybe the problem is that your team doesn't respect your opinion — which is rather independent from whether you're losing all of your arguments.
[OP] cetera | a month ago
I've had a mixture for sure: times when my life would get worse if I lost, and times when it felt that way but I was just over-reacting or already burnt out, or other kinds of team dysfunction like poor ownership.
Tech work can be a double-edged sword: we often get a lot more power to choose what we work on than other kinds of workers, but we also get a lot of variance in the kinds of work we might be expected to do. Like that time my employer started a lawsuit with Amazon and decided that meant everyone should migrate to Azure. That's still in my job description, but a migration like that could be soul-crushing. I left for unrelated reasons, but I was very fortunate to have the ability to leave and still pay rent, unlike many other fields.
Johz | a month ago
Isn't that exactly the attitude from the article and what the person you're replying to are critiquing?
If you assume you're right in every conversation, then yes, every decision feels vital. But if your colleagues are roughly as smart as you but coming at things from different perspectives (which seems likely, statistically speaking) then you're probably going to be wrong roughly as often as you're going to be right. Irritatingly, you can't tell in advance which times are which, so it makes sense to be humble about all your opinions because you never know which ones are actually going to turn out to be bad ideas.
(The corollary of this is that you're going to be right roughly as often as you're going to be wrong, which means that it makes sense to also be confident about all your opinions because you don't know which ones will turn out to be good ideas either.)
Of course, this implies that you trust your team reasonably well, which is what most of the article expands on (and well!): how you can build trust in a team, how you can address conflicts in a healthy way, etc. If you don't have that trust, then maybe it is easier to just assume you're right in every case and then you're back to square one. But you're also going to be less effective now, because everyone in the team is going to be vehemently arguing for decisions that, roughly half the time, are going to be wrong.
quasi_qua_quasi | a month ago
When I am having work conversations, I'm having work conversations with specific people, not the statistical average of all developers. There are some people I know I can trust to have well-thought rationales behind their decisions, and some who absolutely do not have this trust.
LenFalken | a month ago
Your life gets worse if your company that employs you dies.
mplant | a month ago
The fact is 99.9999% of technical disagreements have absolutely no effect on the success of a company, and if your opinion mattered that much to effect things so dramatically you'd be in a position where you could just tell people what to do
epidemian | a month ago
Hmm, that doesn't really match what i've seen in this industry. I've worked on companies where bad technical decisions negatively affected products, sometimes even completely tanking them, and ending in the eventual downfall of the company.
These were small-ish startups, yes. And there were other factors that contributed to the failure of the company, sure. But let's not dismiss the disastrous effect that a terrible technical decision can have. I mean a decision like "let's allocate most of our development efforts on a complete rewrite of our main web front-end [which is already working and generating revenue, btw] into a 'modern' stack using React and GraphQL because <reasons>".
Given that i've seen these kind of problems first-hand more than once, i'd say your estimation of 99.9999% of technical disagreements having no effect on the success of a company is off. Otherwise, my experience would be an extreme outlier.
mplant | a month ago
This isn’t what I really said though. Are you saying that one of your coworkers, a person on your team you had equal footing with, said that everyone should participate in this complete rewrite? That doesn’t seem likely, or if it is a signal of a completely dysfunctional organization that would have failed in due course anyway. What seems more likely is that a tech lead, a person who can make decisions and disregard your good opinion, unilaterally decided this
epidemian | a month ago
There is a huge range between a coworker's disagreement having "absolutely no effect" and them having the power to dictate what the whole development team does. In reality, most organizations will be in some middle ground between those two absurd extremes. Which was kinda my point.
To make it more explicit: i think we developers often have more power to influence and change things than the culture of our companies wants us to believe. I have refused to do things on technical grounds or moral being a junior developer, and wasn't fired for it. And in some cases those things were not done by anyone else afterwards (even though the person who told me to, my boss, was technically capable of doing them. And in other cases, like the stupid rewrite i mentioned above, i didn't act, even if i disagreed strongly. And i regretted not having done so, because i could, and i think there was a probability of avoiding disaster.
mplant | a month ago
I don’t disagree with you, and I don’t really think I made this clear but I’m talking about technical disagreements with coworkers who are roughly the same level as you on a team
epidemian | a month ago
Ahh, thanks for the clarification. I think i understand your point better now. And yeah, i kind of agree with that. Your first post on this thread was more in that same line, and TBH was much more sensible to me. I think i knee-jerk reacted to the other post which i replied to.
bitshift | a month ago
Got me smiling right at the start.
icefox | a month ago
I recently went through this process several times, with fairly random people I felt deep in my heart that I had wronged long ago. Unilaterally they said "oh yeah, I remember you. you're worried about old beef? what old beef? lmao it's not a problem, I always felt you were a kinda sweet guy. nice to hear from you!"
jmtd | a month ago
I’m not sure what I was expecting when I opened this but it was far richer and more profoundly relevant to me than I realised. Thanks for sharing
[OP] cetera | a month ago
Happy to share! Thanks for the kind words!
fbegyn | a month ago
This was an unexpected delight and a good read.
I always enjoy when people reference materials where their concepts and ideas come from. I've looked into some of the reference material and put a few on order to read through since they seem to resonate with me.
reezer | a month ago
I have a thought that I hope doesn't come across too rejective or something. But I have a feeling that present day management and company structures - also outside of our industry - are extremely flawed. I think that wrong ideas have been picked up at spread. Productivity should be high, everyone is burned out but nobody has actual solutions but grand speeches. And I get it it's all you can do, of the structure is a certain way but it has effects on how people work and eg make decisions.
I think that's something that has to be accepted because just saying "others do the same" doesn't mean it's the approach is any good. It seems to work better or worse for some and all that but I think to a degree we drifted into a world where work and companies are semi religious things in that we do things cause they make sense or create benefit but kind of arbitrary numbers are their own goal which is pretty silly. And that I think includes the winners. Given how people spend money when they are rich I think few are genuinely happy. They might be addicted to some stuff and therefore might think so, but I doubt there is much fulfilling for many of them.
I think it's time to reevaluate these things and I tbh the post does that, even when it might not be the primary goal.
icefox | a month ago
See if you can find stuff written about Morning Star. They're a tomato growing and packaging company, of all things. Something like 500 employees with, supposedly, zero hierarchy. People do the job they want to do, or which needs doing. Sorta unimaginable, but the fact that it exists at all gives me hope.
conartist6 | a month ago
Just a fun aside about that Colosseum painting: the spectators are giving the thumbs down -- the same thumb-based life-or-death referendum seen in the movie Gladiator.
They made one small change for the movie though: they made "thumbs down" the signal for death in the movie, while in ancient Rome thumbs down meant "no do not kill that person, they have fought honorably".