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I've been in food service so I know the pain of horrible customers (pizza delivery!). But, IME, that situation where a waiter must go back and forth is sometime
by trimbo 5y ago
I've been in food service so I know the pain of horrible customers (pizza delivery!). But, IME, that situation where a waiter must go back and forth is sometimes of the waiter's own doing.
Ex: The waiter only hears the first person at the table and then runs off before anyone else can speak. Or, they only bring one thing asked for and forget the rest. Or, they outsource bringing the things to someone else and those people do not bring them, and the waiter never checks again.
From the waiter's perspective, the customer seems unreasonable, but when making that assessment, they are missing information.
Tying this back to the article, people aren't perfect at expressing things. When this design doc situation arises, it really is on the author to figure out why that person objects no matter how it's approached. Fresh ideas are often hard to express and for people to process. Sometimes the objector just has a lingering sense the design isn't right but it's not quite identifiable yet. Obviously, sometimes they are unreasonable, but starting there unless they act like the perfectly logical person in the second example is a bad idea.
TL;DR: in all situations, it's best to try to identify the source of whatever's going on, not immediately assume a person is unreasonable.
- throwawayboise 5y ago> When this design doc situation arises, it really is on the author to figure out why that person objects no matter how it's approached. Fresh ideas are often hard to express and for people to process Sure, I think I would do that for one or two rounds. But at some point I realize this is just someone who is being willfully ignorant or lazy and trying to make it seem like it's my fault.
- mst 5y agoAlso, somebody starting with "this has no documentation" rather than "where's the documentation?" is probably a fairly reliable heuristic as to where things are going to end up.
- twojacobtwo 5y agoThis is the key aspect for me in my assessments of reasonability in another person. I immediately see red flags when someone presents themself as absolutely certain of their pronouncements and more so when they repeatedly show that there is little or no correlation between their confidence level in making a particular statement and the amount of evidence they have or the amount of work they put into determining their conclusions. The truly unfortunate part, in my experience, is that managers typically see this confidence as a surface level indicator that these people know what they're talking about and give these unreasonable people the authority act on their over-confidence.