To bring the topic to a more constructive angle, does anyone have any techniques that might help in these cases?
My default is either extreme ambivalence, or raging hard ass. It's hard to find the middle ground.
"I'm sorry, I don't understand. We just saw a demo showing the Facebook JS SDK was taking X minutes to load, and then masonry took a second. My understanding is that you want to concentrate on optimising masonry. I certainly agree with you that we can and should make masonry as fast as possible. However it seems to me that resolving the thing that's taking minutes rather than seconds would benefit us more."
In other words:
- restate the situation as you see it
- highlight the areas in which you believe common values exist
- rather than saying 'you're not listening to me' - even when it seems like they're really not listening to you - ask what their opinion of the matter is in light of what you've just stated.
This at least got us further: my colleague thought that resolving FB JS SDK performance wasn't possible. I disagreed and thought that with the massive amount of Facebook apps FB either have to know about the performance degradation or we were specifically doing something to interfere with the JS SDK performance.
Our interview process tries to filter out people that can't collaborate.
That's beautiful. May I quote you?