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It has taken me a few years and I still fail sometimes, but I have learned to let people finish and then ask questions instead of telling them they're wrong, even when it's totally obvious to me. "What if that fails in this way?" instead of "that will fail in this way!". It makes the discussion collaborative instead of assuming that it's my job to point out everyone's failures. The punch line in one of my favorite comic stips is "It's not healthy to keep your problems bottled up inside me." It took me a long time to see how that applied to my own interactions.

The thing that gets me is the same thing I hate about politics. You build an elaborate plan on a bad supposition, and people hear the whole plan and forget it’s based on nonsense.

If the ground premise is wrong, and you see where they are going with this silliness, it’s challenging on multiple levels to “let them finish”.

It's mostly about letting them finish the sentence, rather than the plan.

Point 3 though. At some point how can you be so demure? Sometimes people are just stupid and wrong and need to get checked. Some guy working for a year getting nothing done and pretending like its some other problem than what it actually is needs to be forcefully briefed on their ignorance not 'hrmm well you see we tried it this way'.

If it's actually that bad, you should just fire them or do your best to not work with them because they will drag you down with them.

For milder/more moderate cases, giving someone a way to concede without publicly admitting they're wrong is a often a useful tactic to get said person to do things the right way while building trust in your relationship with them.

> Some guy working for a year getting nothing done and pretending like its some other problem than what it actually is

This is a management issue. In a rational engineering organization this guy's manager would be like "okay, so we know there's a problem with this tool. Now how do we work around the tool so we can move on to another problem?" And if the conversation becomes "workarounds are stupid we need to make them fix their tool" then the manager needs to be all like "I agree with you in a perfect world that's how things would work, but we're engineers being paid to solve people's problems and not to build the perfect software system. So build the workaround so we can solve the problem and we'll circle around and fix the tool when we have time."

> needs to be forcefully briefed

This will let you feel superior and get the pleasure of making the dumb person feel terrible, but it really won't accomplish anything productive. What do you hope to gain by doing this? Will they start being smarter? Will they be better at their job?

I'm sorry, doing what you describe is just being a bully. If management isn't dealing with the problem person you should privately make them aware of the issues (in writing if possible). If management is aware of the issues and won't do anything about it, well you did your part and you aren't allowed to fix the problem. Unless it is a life and death or national security situation, either accept that the dummy is going to be around or resign.

If they haven't done any work for a year their manager is useless. You work at a place where managers don't do their job. If you take it upon yourself to set this person straight, you are basically propping up this useless manager. Useless managers hire useless people and chase away good people. Fixing this problem treats the symptom and may let the bad manager last longer than they would have otherwise, which means you are going to have to go set two additional people straight about how useless they are next year.

This is good advice.

I agree it's a management problem. However, I've encountered the case where a developer abruptly teleports from "plateau of sustainability" (high confidence, knowledge and experience) instantly to "Mt. Stupid". And every time it was a case of users becoming confused with UI and doing something that caused injury (including data loss). In that case the developer consistently blamed both the user and user advocate.

I do not think it's bullying to give a bully a taste of their own medicine. It may not solve the problem, to be sure, but pushing back on bullies is not wrong. Pointing out their cognitive dissonance, and drawing a line from their stubbornness to being a bad developer is not wrong either. In particular where the manager doesn't care because 90% of the time that developer is delivering the goods, and just doesn't properly assess the ensuing (UI/UX) hostility.

Bad UI will piss off users. It's I completely expect they should express that frustration directly to the responsible developer. If that developer can't handle it, both accepting the criticism and making appropriate design adjustments, get out of the UI/UX development business.

Sounds like they have a bad manager. Yes some people are bad at their job, and that includes developers, but in every case I've encountered it, their manager enabled it. It could be an equally arrogant bad manager, or a milquetoast bad manager. Servility in a manager is a bad attribute. They should be someone who seeks out the demure contrarian and acts as their advocate, should the manager find their position compelling. Not everyone is confrontational, that isn't the problem though. If the manager isn't seeking out contrary opinions, and only acts obsequious to their developers? That's a stool pigeon of a manager. Bad manager and bad developer? Good luck with that combination.

I find situations where I feel someone else "needs to be forcefully briefed on their ignorance" are situations where I likely don't have the rank, influence, or audience to improve the situation anyway.

I don't really subscribe to Kant-style categorical imperative thinking or defeatist attitudes, but in this case I've always made better progress changing an existing bad thing by being "demure" and accommodating. I might have agency to change things, but if an group of others have have agency to keep it the same, failing to cooperate is counterproductive unless I entirely opt-out or leave.

I kind of miss the point where you think about what people said, react to that actual argument and wonder for brief time whether they actually might have a point.

It is failure of this one way more then just lack of pause - especially in long term relationships.

> don't force them to admit to themselves that they were wrong: if you let people 'save face' they can just get on board and agree with you. If you force them to grapple with being wrong they will be difficult and will hate your guts

I think that an inability to admit a mistake is arrogant and results in a lack of accountability and ownership over individual's work. If someone makes a mistake they should be proactively owning it and trying to find solutions to avoid similar mistakes in the future.