Leadership1 publisher2 min readPublished
A software engineer on why he stopped arguing to be right
A post on wangcong.org describes years of winning technical arguments and losing the rooms they happened in, and the rule it draws is triage. It is one engineer's recollection.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- A software engineer writing on wangcong.org says he used to enjoy arguing for technical correctness in code reviews, design meetings, mailing-list threads and at dinner tables.
- He says most arguments are about ego: when an opinion is the person's position, a stronger argument makes them dig in harder, and even a win leaves an opponent more convinced than before.
- The author writes that people are emotional animals who occasionally think, feeling first and then reasoning backward, following the crowd and mistaking confidence for correctness.
- The post traces its first claim to chapter 2 of the Tao Te Ching, where being and non-being create each other and long and short define each other.
Compiled by The Board RoomSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- decision Triage makes standing the scarce resource in a review, so each objection has to be ranked against the ones a lead will need to make later in the quarter.
- constraint Advice written for peers constrains nothing about a lead who holds the decision, because withholding a correction assumes you cannot simply decide the question.
- exposure The lead who wins visibly meets the same colleagues at the next proposal, and they remember being the person made wrong in front of the team.
- contradiction The post holds that correctness is the whole job for an engineer and also advises withholding correction; whichever half a lead adopts, the other is still true on Monday.
The operational part of the post is one sentence. "I only discuss pros and cons with smart people; I don't argue right and wrong with ego-driven ones," the author wrote [8]. It sorts by the person, not by the claim, and the sorting falls to whoever is deciding whether to speak.
He describes the failure precisely. He wrote that he would "watch someone grow more certain of the very thing I had just disproven, while the room quietly drifted to their side" [4], and that he would "walk away technically right and completely alone" [5]. His earlier belief was the opposite: "I believed that if I just laid out the logic clearly enough, the other person would have no choice but to come around" [2]. The support is his recollection of his own arguments over years, and the post reports no measurements [14].
The rule needs a judgement made in advance: which of the two people is in front of you. He describes the ego-driven counterpart as someone whose opinion is their position, defended with resistance instead of reason, and says the stronger the argument, the harder they dig in [9]. On his own account, "Knowing which conversation you're in is half the battle. The other half is having the discipline to walk away from the second one" [16].
Four sections carry the case [15], and the fourth is where the transfer into engineering breaks down. The author wrote that "even with the best intentions, correcting people usually fails, and here's the hard part: don't do it anyway" [11], because people learn from consequences and "Words bounce off; pain sticks" [12]. In a personal argument, the person who was wrong is the one who meets the consequence. In a design review it is often somebody else. If a bad design ships, the people who maintain it pay, and they were not necessarily in the meeting.
The diagnosis and the abstention come apart. If a visible win entrenches the other side [9], a lead's option is to change the venue and keep the objection: make the point once in writing, where nobody has to be visibly wrong in front of colleagues.
His own timescale is long. "Over the years I've slowly stopped arguing," the author wrote [13]. A lead deciding this quarter faces the smaller version of the question, which is which objections to press with an audience present and which to file in the review tool, and the post's warning about the first case is blunt: "Winning an argument manufactures a loser" [6].
What to watch
- Whether the author publishes the remainder of the final section, which breaks off mid-sentence, and whether it carves out an exception for arguments where the arguer holds the decision.
- Whether anyone tests the entrenchment claim against records of real design reviews rather than recollection.
- Whether teams codify the venue change, moving contested objections into written review where no participant is publicly overruled.