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Comment by O_H_E | Hacker News Reader

> it's that you need to sit with it a minute, and challenge your objection internally

Yaaas please, this so much.

Whoops, you missed your chance to object and now you've just signed up to fix the hard parts of someone else's bad idea!

Boiling down engineering decisions into dispassionate lists of tradeoffs is an important skill, but early in my career I erred too hard in this direction. Coworkers who spoke without thinking "won" every time and I got stuck digging us out of the holes they led us into even though I had seen the holes from miles away. This happened several times before I learned to trust myself and stand up for my own ideas even if I wasn't 100% confident in them. That's an important skill too.

Isn’t there a reasonable middle ground? One could just say what they mean: “I have some major concerns about this idea.” It doesn’t shut anything down while still communicating there is significant pushback.

Of course, and finding that middle ground is key to good communication. My point was that "contemplate more, advocate less" is only the correct advice if you're currently contemplating too little and advocating too much. The opposite situation doesn't just exist, it's common, especially among us nerds, and the cure lies in the opposite direction.

Ultimately you want to set up a feedback loop that looks for evidence that you are erring in one direction or another and corrects appropriately, but by now we have descended into the realm of completely generic self-help :)

> My point was that "contemplate more, advocate less"

Then you've missed then point you were responding to, which was contemplate first, advocate later

That, plus most of the times inclined to say TWW, even if you are so because of a feeling, you can tie it at least intuitively to a use case, a specific part of the system that would be challenging etc. in these cases a good middle ground is to ask “how will that work for … “

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