news.ycombinator.com• Dec 4, 2022• 1 min read
Ask HN: How to work with people who push back forcefully?I've worked at a large, famous software company with an academic-inspired workplace and culture for almost 8 years and been fairly successful.Several times in that span, I've worked with people who push back quite forcefully on comments or feedback on topics or practices that have either explicit company standards or at least generally accepted best practices.It seems to me that most people at the company are conflict-avoidant so that when these people push back aggressively, it's often a successful strategy. Ten minutes of arguing and wearing the other person down saves them 20 minutes of writing unit tests or fixing their code or whatever. I've seen in the past that these people effectively carve out an unspoken exemption for themselves because everyone is sick of having the same conversation.I'm the tech lead but not manager of my current team and I'm responsible for the technical execution of the team and the success or failure on that level. There are a bunch of great people who d