Ask HN: How do you highlight “talking people out of bad ideas” as a strength? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you highlight “talking people out of bad ideas” as a strength?

24 pointsjawns13 comments

Looking back, some of my most valuable contributions as an engineer have been convincing other engineers to reconsider proposed designs, or even full projects. My guidance has helped them avoid wasted efforts, over-engineered solutions, and maintenance nightmares.

But how do you quantify that impact and highlight it as a strength, when a lot of it is has to do with subjunctives and hypotheticals? And how do you delicately word it on a site like LinkedIn, where the coworkers involved might happen upon it?

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As someone who is personally a bad idea machine, I feel qualifies to respond here. There's a lot to unpack here, but I think it boils down to being good at winnowing down a solution space - which is pretty squarely a Systems Engineering skill - specifically at the concept design phase.

The truth is, when a problem is very open, there are generally far - far... far more bad candidate solutions than "good" ones. So, being able to articulately explain why an idea is bad or perhaps more likely has some mix of "good" and "bad" elements, in a manner that is irrefutable and does not diminish the courage of engineers proposing the concept in the first place, is a critical skill.

I think the key to highlighting this skill on your resume isn't stating that you know how to simply identify 'bad' solutions and say no to them, but rather that you were able to identify where solutions fell short and then led the individual or team to a solution that worked and was far superior to alternatives. After all, that's what matters. Anyone can say "no" and because of the large disparity between good and bad ideas (as described above), you'll have plenty of opportunity to do so - so, that's not very impressive. Finding the good solution [needle in the hay stack] is the skill you want to highlight... with substantive examples.

If your interested in this topic of winnowing a design space down, you may be interested in a method called Set Based Design - which is a winnowing method for mutli-objective problem sets developed by Toyota and can accelerare/automate the winnowing process.

You find what's valid underneath the idea, and then you build on that together with the person. You listen empathetically to the idea, using "yes and", and probe with compassion to find the problem, never invalidating the idea itself.

If someone has a "bad idea" it's often not the idea that's important, its the underlying problem or motivation. The idea can be one way of having a conversation about the problem, and explore, with curiosity about lots of ideas. Then you can share the pros/cons together, and co-create a good solution.

This doesn't always work, but it helps build a relationship, instead of coming across as a jerk to the person.

Also worth pointing out, a lot of seemingly "bad ideas", are just because you-the person who decided the idea was "bad"- don't have all the information and context, and your job is to expand your context to include theirs before making any judgments.

> where the coworkers involved might happen upon it

This should be an internal red flag. If saying something publicly make you nervous because you know other people might have a problem with you saying it.... maybe that is not the right thing to say.

Odds are, there is a way to make such claims without it being about other people. Say nothing about talking other people into changing. Say things about the positive business impact that came to fruition because our your general advice and guidance. If you are not able to cite such positive impacts, maybe your guidance was not as strong as you think it was.

Also, I'd probably not even talk to someone who promotes themselves as talking other people out of things. Even if you were always 100% correct, it shows an ego-driven perspective which would make me worry that you aren't going to be balanced and listen when teammates need to talk you down from a bad idea.

Corp speak for this is “Thought Leadership.” I always found it annoying to use, but when in Rome…

Try to break that down into the positive versions - estimation, requirements, design, etc - and then list projects that went better because you're on them. Ideally get a quote or reference from someone else saying "the projects Jawns was on went better for X, Y, Z reasons - he really helps things go faster/smoother/etc."

Save those for interviews I guess. Or frame the suggestions as X against Y, where Y saved you some amount of effort.

Write a manual on how to do it, and then market yourself as a writer. What is your secret?

Just tell stories. Write then down. Get feedback on the specific stories from people you trust who will be honest with you. Accept that the stories might make you look bad and be willing to revise, or even omit them.

Ultimately this is about specifics.

just one perspective :

framing other's ideas as bad might come across as lacking humility to some.

maybe it can be framed as contributing critical ideas to design and convincing rest of the team to see why they need to revise the designs.

maybe you can mention in the passing that it is asking to talking people out of bad ideas, because they get attached to their own designs and sometimes need strong, well-articulated evidence / reasons to change their minds.

I would say that you are able to consolidate a group of people into taking a better path to achieve specific goals.

Consultant?

Senior Consultant.

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