3 ms·

> at which point you can stop pointlessly arguing and fall back on negotiation. "Well, I'll accept your PR if you at least Z." Or, for example, your coworker (a

> at which point you can stop pointlessly arguing and fall back on negotiation. "Well, I'll accept your PR if you at least Z." Or, for example, your coworker (and/or yourself for that matter) might feel "negotiation" is the wrong kind of approach toward engineering problems in the first place. Again, nice in theory, and sometimes that might work, but it has lots of failure modes. For example, you can end up with nonsensical Z's that neither of you would otherwise find particularly worthwhile or compelling, even though you both agree that, yes, Z would improve things slightly. Exaggerated example: imagine the original debate had been over "we should leave the bike by the road so it's convenient to grab it and go" vs. "we should lock the bike by the house so it's harder to steal it", which is a debate over a 2-minute task. Your compromise Z might end up being an additional 1-week task like "well I'll let you leave it near the road if you/we first build a brown bikeshed for it so it at least looks nicer". You might both agree that it would indeed looks nicer that way, so there needn't be any disagreement on Z itself, but neither of you would've felt it appropriate to spend any time or resources on Z in the absence of the negotiation. Usually it's not that stark of a contrast, but I've seen milder versions of this play out frequently in practice. Even when both people play along a few times (which often doesn't happen), they end up getting tired of having to go through it every time there's a disagreement.

FeepingCreature 4y ago
> Again, nice in theory, and sometimes that might work, but it has lots of failure modes. For example, you can end up with nonsensical Z's that neither of you would otherwise find particularly worthwhile or compelling, even though you both agree that, yes, Z would improve things slightly. I think that's where negotiation is a stronger frame though, because that sort of debate generally comes down to "how do I get through this faster", and the negotiative framing is "I disagree, but it doesn't matter, because the thing I actually want is for us to stop having this conversation, how can I achieve this with the greatest efficiency", or phrased otherwise, "what do I need to give you to make you go away?" Which there is much less to talk about.

FeepingCreature 4y ago

> Again, nice in theory, and sometimes that might work, but it has lots of failure modes. For example, you can end up with nonsensical Z's that neither of you would otherwise find particularly worthwhile or compelling, even though you both agree that, yes, Z would improve things slightly. I think that's where negotiation is a stronger frame though, because that sort of debate generally comes down to "how do I get through this faster", and the negotiative framing is "I disagree, but it doesn't matter, because the thing I actually want is for us to stop having this conversation, how can I achieve this with the greatest efficiency", or phrased otherwise, "what do I need to give you to make you go away?" Which there is much less to talk about.