Comment by moreira | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moreira | Hacker News Reader

> "giving in" does not preserve peace—it simply appeases bullies and makes the workplace toxic.

This doesn’t sound right. You are not going to agree with 100% of someone else’s decisions. No matter how much you discuss something, no matter if you understand all the ramifications, everything there could possibly be. Sometimes you’re just not going to agree with the direction someone else is taking, and you’re going to have to accept it.

And that’s okay. It’s not toxic to disagree with someone, or to accept that even though you might disagree, they’re going to do X their way (or that you’re going to have to do X their way because that’s what they want). That’s not office politics, that’s life.

If not agreeing means "let's agree to disagree" then that's fine and healthy.

If not agreeing means "I need to pretend I agree even when I have good reason to disagreee because this person needs to be appeased" that is not healthy and contributes to a toxic workplace.

This post is talking about the latter scenario.

What I’ve found useful is to dig until we understand why we disagree. Assuming the other person reasoned their self into a reasonable position, then if we have different answers then we probably came from different starting points.

Usually we can work backwards and discover that we have different starting assumptions or work forwards and discover that we have different goals. Those pieces tend to be more ambiguous and much easier to “agree to disagree”. And it’s why both people can be 100% that they are correct - because in each of their frames of reference they are.

This was a big red flag for me, too. There’s a reason the term “bike-shedding” exists among developers.

You want to keep the bikes dry, and what color you paint the shed, or whether you call the paint “tan” or “beige,” matters not at all. Labeling people who disagree with you about the paint color as “bullies,” and fighting them to the death, is profoundly useless. Just ask yourself what really matters, and let the rest go.

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