Hacker News Reader

Comment by yomly | Hacker News Reader

At Amazon you had "disagree and commit" and (used to have) "vocally self critical".

The commit part is actually very important - once the TEAM makes a DECISION everyone is on board with it and runs with it. You don't half ass it or sabotage it.

But if it does go wrong, the decision maker should have the strength of character to acknowledge "you were right"

These two factors held in tension and taken at face value (rather than virtuous politik doublethink) can lead to good team dynamics on a team full of mature people IMO

View on HN

It's difficult to "commit" to something that is clearly and utterly wrong.

If it is clearly and utterly wrong, why is it so hard for you to convince your team/business? /troll

Being charitable, sometimes the team/org needs to obtain the group learning. If you've had your say, then time will prove you right and people will remember.

If the team/org won't remember AND they just like to rain down decisions on you from above, why you working there...?

In any case communication is HARD. It's always easy to blame people for not listening, but you can't control other people, only yourself. So the most constructive thing to focus on is doing everything in your power to make it clearly and utterly obvious what you can see that no one else can see. That will stay with you and eventually teams will listen to you.

The faster it fails, the faster you might have an opportunity to point out the failure points and suggest the correct solution.

Sometimes the solution is 'not to do that bad thing' and quite often there's no going back from that.

Agree, but if you are the person to say "I told you so", you aren't in a position to influence avoiding that condition. Also, the individuals in the project have the potential to learn from the failure even if the project/company doesn't survive.

Obviously there are life critical systems where this shouldn't even be possible, but hopefully there are tests and trials that filter broken products/services before life is put in harm's way.

But what if you're the one who's wrong?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com