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Comment by wellpast | Hacker News Reader

I'm still part Alice, I think. The Carnegie book really helped me, for sure.

The difficulty though is that at some point if you believe something is important you may ultimately have to go through some kind of dialectic to make your case.

How to Win Friends and Influence People says never have an argument. If you follow this advice you will reap the benefits of the book. However what you're building in your team will trend toward a Least Common Denominator. Or else I don't know how to not let that happen in a world where you can't debate. (Any response that tries to say debate/argument/dialectic aren't all the same thing in this context I think is cheating. Or someone enlighten me.)

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I don't particularly like HTWFAIP so please don't take this is a canonical reply, but I never read it as an outright prohibition on debate. Rather, it seems to argue that you can disagree but that an effective leader should keep a disagreement from becoming an outright argument.

It sounds like a silly distinction, but what if you and I disagree about something. I have two choices. I could:

A.) Get incredibly defensive when you disagree, interrupt you constantly, lose my temper and flat out refuse to listen to your ideas.

B.) Thank you for disagreeing because we're all on the same team and want to avoid mistakes. Then I'd listen to everything you have to say and work hard to find areas where we agree. And, after I understand your argument, I point out all the areas where you are correct (and especially areas where I am wrong).

I'd argue that it's more about learning to disagree respectfully and tamper all the impulses to get defensive and turn it into a series of personal attacks.

I agree. I kinda of have a love-hate thing with HTWFAIP. I find it incredibly irritating but also useful? I'm a 3rd gen software engineer and my grandpa and dad were always known for being extremely mean. So I learned a lot bad behaviors from them and other engineers. I think the workplace now is getting less tolerant of that kind of thing though.

When you have multiple completely reasonable options picking either one is not a big deal. Sure, if A is vastly better than B, you can probably convince a team of that. However, when A and B are about as good then arguing about them is a waste of time.

Learning how to separate those situations is important, but not usually a major issue when approached in that context. If all else fails just have a coin flip and say winner takes all. If someone still can't let it go, they are toxic and it's time to remove them from the team.

PS: I call it the bike shedding rule. You need a system to pick a color for a bike shed with reasonable costs. The actual color is less important than the time wasted on the choice.

This comment is predicated on the idea that each problem can be solved/handled in isolation. Each isolated solution can be weighed against another and deemed better, vastly better, etc.

I think in many cases an optimal product can only be produced when there is a holistic vision that is kept in view. And in this paradigm, is is much more difficult to say A is vastly better than B.

Here's just one example--> many software systems that I come to have trended into maintenance nightmares. When you trace back all of the steps from inception to the present moment, you realize that it is due to a series of these kind of A/B decisions that boiled the frog. In each case A wasn't vastly better than B. But the sum of all the A decisions... And this is where it gets harder to make a case... where you may have to take a long walk to make the case...

It'd be great if there was a social protocol for having constructive debates, so they weren't always assumed to be bad things.

Something like what was discussed in this thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14119024

Non Violent Communication (by Marshall Rosenberg) provides some good scaffolding to ensure people can communicate in such a way that their criticism isn't taken as hurtful. Useful in many situations in life, not just company meetings.

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