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Comment by novok | Hacker News Reader

That is why you write that in a standards document, along with the reasons why and have a consensus about it. That way it becomes impersonal.

Same thing with auto formatters and linters sidestepping a lot of pointless bickering and bike shedding.

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That works for things you want to DO, but is hard for things you DON'T want to do.

As I mentioned in another post, as your org grows, there's going to be an infinite amount of things people push, and pushing back is hard. If you have to stop and write a consensus document for every single one, you'll be doing nothing else.

How hard is it to say "these are the types of things we want to do. anything must look like these types of things in terms of (insert x y and z criteria: size, scale, opportunity, profitability, growth, etc)

spoiler alert: it isn't hard and this is what we do at my startup that is currently experiencing hyper growth and is on multiple "unicorn" lists

I can't even tell if it's satire. But if it's not: I haven't see it be done easily over several hundred engineers. If you have that kind of charisma, hat off to you!

Charisma is certainly something I have never been told I lack. Maybe we are lucky and have the right people as well.

With things you don't want to do, you make it concise with a whitelist. Like 'we only use these 2 languages for our backend and here is why:'.

If you have the authority to tell people no in the first place to make it stick, you have the ability to write that in a wiki page. You can go full FAQ mode for the miscellaneous stuff as it comes up.

Documenting the why is really important, so you don't get zombie decisions self perpetuating in your org and allow for change.

Linters are probably the single biggest productivity boost an organization can engage if they don't yet have one.

It's still personal: it's "authors of the document" vs everyone else. Often the "everyone else" have not been hired yet.

> Often the "everyone else" have not been hired yet.

And they may never get hired and you still have to fight with them.

I'm, honestly, TERRIFIED of what "thought leaders" may post on hacker news/twitter/reddit tonight, tomorrow, next week. The moment I see one of them suggest something that just wouldn't work for us, I -know- I'm going to have to fight 50 people at work soon who drank the koolaid.

If something is written down before you were even hired and it says no, then you know that the people are saying 'no' not because they don't like you or some other petty interpersonal political reason, but because of the actual technical reasons or some overarching political reason unrelated to you, personally.

When something isn't personal, it diffuses a lot of emotional tension. Our monkey brains jump to taking things personally way too easily probably as some sort of early tribal instinct for survival.

I don't really understand what you mean by personal otherwise? I was implying 'personal' was specific person personal.

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