Should I Challenge My Developer Peers In Public?

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Hey folks, I'm just headed to CrossFit here. We are going to go to experience dance for a topic today. Um, this one is someone saying they're I guess asking if if it's okay, acceptable to to question a peer's design in what they say like in a respectable way. like can they bring that up in a sort of public conversation with the team? And kind of interesting because like I think sometimes when you read um comments in a thread like this kind of gives you a hint as to why people hesitate about about this kind of stuff. And it's because uh I don't know sometimes developers are just man. like there's no good reason for people to to react the way they did so strongly um in some cases on this thread. And I I feel like that's just like such a a telling sign of like why do you think people are sometimes walking around on eggshells?

Give me one sec. I just have to I don't know if that's too loud. Sorry, I had to turn on my defroster. Um, and so what I mean by that is like, uh, you know, one of the one of the comments that was upvoted is like, you know, like, are you me right now? Like, isn't this experienced devs? Like, or are you just some newbie? Like, obviously, you're in a design meeting and you should talk about design. Like, what the hell's going on? This is so stupid. And like, uh-huh. But like, number one, you don't need to be an Number two, you didn't actually read the post because they didn't say that they were in a design meeting. The context is different. They're asking, they're in like a sync meeting talking about the work they've done for the week or whatever. Kind of like a standup, right?

And they're talking about the progress on work. It's not a design meeting, Um, you know, so like this just a I I love this kind of stuff because, you know, it's it's just such a such a telling sign that, you know, people people need to ease up a little bit because you're part of the problem. But let's talk about this a little bit more because uh I think it's a good question, right? the I think the person's coming from a good spot. Uh they are acknowledging sorry the person who posted the questions coming from a good spot not the people being jerks. Um they're in a conversation and they're trying to acknowledge like hey look like from the technical side of things I I think I see something that feels like a gap or something that should probably uh clarify. But also like number one I realize maybe this isn't a productive forum for it.

Number two, um because it's public, I don't want to like sit here looking like I'm openly criticizing someone and and being a jerk to them. Go figure, right? Like the irony. Uh so I think a couple things come to mind here. Uh one, like I said, I think good to good to acknowledge this stuff. Uh, I think the more that we can be, I don't know, like familiar or aware of our our settings is helpful because otherwise you can over time turn into one of these people that, you know, you're like, I'm doing the right thing. And really, uh, people just think that you're a jerk to work with. And no one really wants that. I feel like it's relatively preventable. And um you know I think that even the people that that act that way, they're not doing it to be a jerk. It's just that they've like over time or maybe have always kind of lacked awareness of this kind of thing.

So I think awareness is good. Proud of this person for kind of pausing to to do that. Um I think that uh one like on the is this the right forum kind of thing. Let's talk about for the topic, right? uh is it the right forum for the topic? I think that's a team culture kind of thing, right? Uh if it's a like if truly like a stand-up meeting where everyone's just going through status, uh I wouldn't derail a status update meeting to go over that. I would not ignore it either, but I wouldn't try to consume the whole meeting for that. And the reason for that is like that isn't the forum for it. Uh something like a sync meeting like that or a standup generally is much quicker. What is this guy doing? Let me in. Just gets beside me and matches my speed.

Okay. Um I know that well I'm sure lots of folks uh have been on standup meetings. I guess I say lots I don't know. uh I don't know the exact number of people and uh watching this and level of experience but I think it's really common that people have been in situations where they're in a you know they're their quick standup sync meeting whether they do it daily or weekly and it's supposed to be like just talk about you know uh whether you've reach milestones and if you're blocked right because otherwise like sort of the details don't matter right now and we got other to do um and if you're doing these less frequently. Sometimes more detail is is warranted because you do it less frequently and you need a little bit more detail. But we've all been in these meetings where they go over and we're like, "Okay, what are we doing here?" And a lot of the time things like this go over because you have individuals that are pushing them over time.

Whether that's because they're just going way too deep into things and it's like that's just not not a helpful conversation for for the whole group or you have situations like what this person's potentially trying to avoid which is like hey I think we should talk about that probably not the right forum for it but whatever like you and I we're going to talk about this right now in front of everyone uh who might not have any reason to participate right or maybe one other person is participating in that conversation, but otherwise kind of just wasting everyone else's time. And so this depends a lot on the team culture and how you're, you know, the context of your meetings to be honest. I can't I literally cannot answer that for you because I'm not on your team to to kind of, you know, navigate that. But that's that's what I would recommend you kind of step back and look at.

Um, I know that in like the sync meetings that I have for some of my feature crews, feature crews for me are just like smaller sub teams uh that work in sort of u specific uh product or service areas, but um because we do our sync meetings weekly uh especially because we cross time zones and stuff, it would be a bit of a bit crazy for us to do them every day. um because we do them weekly. If we had to get in design discussions, it would be totally fine. We had, you know, 30 minutes. Uh one of them I think is 45 minutes and enough people on the team where like if we needed to go, you know, for one person spend a minute just kind of doing a quick update and another person we had to do 5 to 10 minutes, uh we can generally generally do that.

So that wouldn't be out of the blue with my teams. I don't think anyone would be like, "Oh man, what the hell's going on?" But even with that said, if we were like, "Okay, like we're realizing that someone's design that they've been working on, maybe someone had some other information, we somehow missed it up front." If we're like, "Okay, this needs a really deep conversation," we would just say and we'd say, "Look, we should get some follow-up time on this." And just go discuss it. So that again so that we're not derailing everyone else's time. Like you can get a pretty good indication of this if you're on this call with people or if it's in person. If you're looking around the room and everyone's staring off into space or doing other things like probably not a good use of the group's time. And it doesn't mean that it's a bad topic or no one should talk about it.

It's probably just not a good use of the group's time. So table it, follow up on it, move on. Okay, but these are things that you kind of have to look at with your team. I do think it's a good question to ask. And if you're not sure, maybe talk to uh your manager, team lead, talk to someone more senior on the team, right? Um but let's kind of talk about the other piece of this, which is okay, let's assume that it's okay to talk about in terms of uh the forum. The other piece that this person is, you know, potentially hinting at here is like, I'm I'm about to question this person's design in front of a group of people. And they did call out. They're like, "Hey, like, you know, it would be in a respectable way." Uh, I don't I don't know the person.

And I don't know what respectable looks like to them. But like I said at the beginning of this, I do think it's a good acknowledgement, like some awareness to be like, if I'm about to criticize or openly question someone's stuff, I don't want that to feel like an attack, right? That's kind of the gist of it. And I think that's a a really good uh thing to to call out. So, how do you do that, right? How do you how do you question someone without them getting defensive immediately? I would say is uh is one of your goals with this. That might not be for some people top of mind because they might be going like I think something's missing here or I don't think this is right. Like my goal is that we need to get to the bottom of this. For some people that's not even their goal.

They're thinking my goal is to to tell someone that they're wrong, right? like this, you know, this other design or this other approach is the right way. But, uh, I think if you can like step back from this for a moment and I think one of your first goals if you want to have a meaningful discussion because I think that ultimately is your goal is to discuss it. If you want it to be meaningful, you don't want someone to get completely defensive. Now, you can't control other people, right? You can't control whether or not someone gets defensive. You can, however, influence that. Uh there are things that you can do to help minimize it, minimize your impact of that. Uh or things you can do to maximize how defensive someone gets, right? It's just that you ultimately don't get to say whether or not that's what happens.

That's their their reaction to it. So, I I do think that you want to find ways to talk about this where you're not insinuating from the start that you think that they're wrong, which might be kind of weird because you might actually think they're wrong. And it's not wrong for you to think that. But I think there's a couple comments in that Reddit thread that I think uh were kind of hinting at it. One of the best ways that you can do that is to be genuinely curious. Right? If you go into conversations like this and you assume that whoever you're talking to was acting with best intentions, that they are a smart person, they're not just being an idiot or being malicious or whatever, they're they're doing things that they they believe are right given the information they have and trying to do their best job.

Okay? Whether or not you genuinely believe that about this person may be a different story. But I would say if you can try to go into conversations thinking this because if you do that and you genuinely try to be curious, that's a a really helpful way to minimize how defensive someone gets. So, I want to think of a an example that I can try to do without it being so contrived that it's like missing the point. But if someone uh someone has a design for putting a cache in place for some I don't know some flow where you're calling some API. Okay. And we got to start caching this data. Uh actually maybe it's a it's a performance optimization is the goal and and their solution is that they're putting this cache in place. And so the way that they've decided to implement the cache is they're going to they're going to use some some caching stack and it's not reddus, it's something else.

and you're going, "Hold on." Like in your mind maybe cashing makes sense right on the surface and you're going, "Well, if we're going to cash, like don't we have this other other thing that the rest of our teams are using?" And that's Reddus for for caching. Like what, you know, wait a second like why is this another whole thing, right? So in your mind, you might be going, "No, no, no. like we we use Reddus like this is wrong. And so instead of jumping into the conversation being like hey like uh nope uh you you need to be using Reddus for this and then immediately someone's going to try and defend likely defend why they're not using Reddus or maybe that's not even the perspective they take. It's not here's why I'm not using Reddus. It's like I'm using this because whatever and they will start to defend it.

Now you might have, you know, depending on your report with the person, you might have a very meaningful discussion that way. Still, a lot of this depends on your working relationship with people. For example, uh you know, the guys that I build brand goes with, I've worked with them for for years and years. we literally can have conversations with each other and be extremely blunt, right? Like we don't we don't have to to worry about a lot of this stuff because we have been working together for so long. Um certainly there's other people I work with and I would say probably for a large majority of people um you probably don't get to this this level unless you work with people for years and years.

So instead of doing the hey like you're using the wrong thing or this isn't right uh why not ask them right why not be curious about like well how yeah like why are you using that and you can ask that in ways that don't sound condescending or don't sound patronizing right cuz you could say well why are you using that that's not very helpful either and I realize that this probably sounds obvious when it's coming out of my face, right? I will tell you though that I've absolutely seen people that are not intending to ask questions that way. And literally the receiver, that's all they hear is this person is always an to me because they question what I'm doing. So, you're not questioning someone to challenge them or to quiz them. You're being curious. How how can you be curious, right? Hey, I see that you're using this and uh seems interesting.

I I don't know much about that or I do know a bunch about that and uh just wanted to understand why like for this case um this was the solution you went with. I'm I'm not sure that I've seen this other places in the codebase. So I I wanted to you know get a better handle on for this code like why did we decide to go with that? You can use words like we as well, right? These are little things, but you can say things like we so that you're not insinuating or uh kind of directing everything at someone. When you say, "Why did we like, hey, curious why we went this way?" You're siding with them, right? We're a team. This is a decision that was made. We If you go, "You, why are you doing this?" Um, small detail, but that's something that people get more defensive about.

Uh, I'm at CrossFit, so that's kind of the end of this video, unfortunately. But I I think just to leave this one off, there's a lot of stuff around the language you use, they can make a big difference. You might be watching this and going, "Well, this is all I can't believe that we have to think about stuff like this. Why can't people just be adults and whatever?" And uh, got news for you. That's just how it is, man. It's communication. So, uh, if you're feeling like it's awkward, if you're feeling like you shouldn't have to do that work, it's probably, uh, the thing that you need to spend some time on working on. So, there you go. See you in the next video.