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A lot of engineers write needlessly aggressively too. Our own Linus Torvalds is famous for it. I too am guilty of this from time to time. It's not a problem uni

A lot of engineers write needlessly aggressively too. Our own Linus Torvalds is famous for it. I too am guilty of this from time to time. It's not a problem unique to lawyers -- humans like to display their power, real or perceived, to "enemies," and it takes a conscious effort to overcome that tendency.

chris_wot 11y ago
I have to agree with this. I used to be overly aggressive (I still have a tendency towards this state of being), but I've found its completely counter productive. I recently had a major service completely stop working, and I couldn't get hold of the remote development team to fix it. I had my manager escalate to half the world, but we only did it to get their attention as it literally stopped the Australian side of the business cold - it was an existential threat to our business, and I wasn't about to let it happen. However, once the development team started working on the issue (with upper management on their case), I deliberately ratcheted down the pressure. I did this by stopping all emails from being cc'ed to managers, and I acknowledged that the team working on the project were under pressure but that my only goal was to get a fix and frankly I wasn't interested in blame, only a result. When I took out the managers from the email I also told the devs that I appreciated their work, and from this point I'd work with them cooperatively, and that I would give them space to deal with the problem without constant distractions from managers asking for updates. The dev team worked on the issue and fixed it a few hours before the start of the business day and I verified the fix. Then I sent an email to their team acknowledging the fix, and the effort they had put into it - only at this point I copied all the orginal managers to the email. Yesterday I discovered the dev team had done a review of every case I'd ever opened to them, found some additional problems which they fixed without me asking, and then ensured all open cases got a status update and were being actively worked on. You capture more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. And I felt pretty good!

chris_wot 11y ago

I have to agree with this. I used to be overly aggressive (I still have a tendency towards this state of being), but I've found its completely counter productive. I recently had a major service completely stop working, and I couldn't get hold of the remote development team to fix it. I had my manager escalate to half the world, but we only did it to get their attention as it literally stopped the Australian side of the business cold - it was an existential threat to our business, and I wasn't about to let it happen. However, once the development team started working on the issue (with upper management on their case), I deliberately ratcheted down the pressure. I did this by stopping all emails from being cc'ed to managers, and I acknowledged that the team working on the project were under pressure but that my only goal was to get a fix and frankly I wasn't interested in blame, only a result. When I took out the managers from the email I also told the devs that I appreciated their work, and from this point I'd work with them cooperatively, and that I would give them space to deal with the problem without constant distractions from managers asking for updates. The dev team worked on the issue and fixed it a few hours before the start of the business day and I verified the fix. Then I sent an email to their team acknowledging the fix, and the effort they had put into it - only at this point I copied all the orginal managers to the email. Yesterday I discovered the dev team had done a review of every case I'd ever opened to them, found some additional problems which they fixed without me asking, and then ensured all open cases got a status update and were being actively worked on. You capture more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. And I felt pretty good!