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Ask HN: Strategies to rein in or prevent bikeshedding?
11–20 of 27 posts
Re: Ask HN: Strategies to rein in or prevent bikeshedding?
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In a meeting? "Let's take that offline." Whats the point of saying this? Do you really want to take it offline or do you just want them to shut up? If you absolutely have to ask a question, try: “Why is this the most important thing for us to discuss right now?” Or if you’re OK making a statement, “I don’t think this is important enough to continue discussing. How do you want us to proceed?” And then if their idea…
The point of "taking it offline" is that they stop wasting everyone else's time with it - they only waste one other person's. Depending on how pathological they are, that may be enough to stop the bikeshedding, because 1) you've just told them they're going on more than the topic deserves, and 2) they can't hold everyone's attention, just yours. It also effectively says "This isn't the most important thing for us to…
> The point of "taking it offline" is that they stop wasting everyone else's time with it
So you’re deciding it’s a good idea to waste your time and their time? Isn’t there work to do?
> It also effectively says "This isn't the most important thing for us to discuss right now".
Don’t effectively say it. Just say it. They’re an adult and can understand when they don’t get their way.
> But it's important that they have a chance to "be heard"
They had their chance to be heard — in the meeting. And if you’re meeting them “offline” to stop wasting everyone else’s time, are you actually hearing them or are you trying to trick them into thinking they are being heard?
Feels like a horrendously frustrating way to work — holding little side meetings to pretend like you care what somebody has to say so you can avoid telling them they are wasting everyone’s time.
Work is work. Sometimes ideas are bad. It’s not Little League where everybody gets a chance to play in every game.
Re: Ask HN: Strategies to rein in or prevent bikeshedding?
#13One thing I can't stand as much or more than bikeshedding, are people who will do 'armchair development' in a meeting of many people, raising obstacles, possible solutions, pros/cons, followed by debates and estimations of risk or effort, etc. We could just make a list of items to explore and have two people work it out. Similarly for group guessing figures, when someone could just run a query/report to get an actual number in as much time.
Re: Ask HN: Strategies to rein in or prevent bikeshedding?
#14Standards, best practices, and copying.
I'm always looking for the hidden unofficial standard, or the option that has the best fit with either existing tech or the "Next Big Thing" people are moving to.
Like, if you ask me to choose a language, there's only about five I'm even going to look at. "more elegant code" isn't enough reason that I'd want to use some new language nobody knows, that half the IDEs don't support well.
Re: Ask HN: Strategies to rein in or prevent bikeshedding?
#15I don't know if this answers the question, but I think one of the big responsibilities of a leader is to make a decision when the decision isn't obvious and it's blocking you.
Someone: "And we're building that shed next week"
Team:
Leader: "Let's paint it black, it's not that critical and we can always change it later"
It doesn't matter if its the best choice. Getting blocked on it is too expensive and other people are too worried about covering their own butts that they waste time on it.
Re: Ask HN: Strategies to rein in or prevent bikeshedding?
#16> The accusation turned their relationship toxic
That sounds like a completely different problem. Bikeshedding is typically just someone getting caught in the weeds, and not a big deal to correct. Point it out, re-focus and move on.
If it turned a relationship toxic, or if people made such a big deal that it even gets described as "outright accuse", it sound like things were blown out of proportion, and there is likely a completely different root cause to the toxicity.
Re: Ask HN: Strategies to rein in or prevent bikeshedding?
#17What one of my teams did in the past when things went off topic into an unproductive area was simply call out that it was off topic for the meeting, to shift things back to the main point. At the same time we would add it to a running list of future discussion topics, so they felt heard and the idea wouldn’t get lost, but it didn’t need to derail us in that moment. Most of the stuff we added to that list was never actually discussed later, as it was ultimately unimportant.
Sometimes the person talking would call themselves out, to have it added to the list, which was always nice. I ended up doing this a lot. An idea or issue would pop into my head, I’d bring it up, then as I was talking about it I would stop and say we should throw it in the parking lot and keep on the main topic.
We also had a weekly (maybe every other week) meeting to just talk about stuff. This gave us a forum to get into some of that oddball stuff if we needed. Having a time and place for this dramatic reduced the spill over into other meetings.
Re: Ask HN: Strategies to rein in or prevent bikeshedding?
#18"We can get back to that. Let's work on the key issues first."
"Sure, red is fine. Let's not overthink this."
Re: Ask HN: Strategies to rein in or prevent bikeshedding?
#19When someone is bike shedding you need to show how trivial what they are talking about is. "Oh it won't work because it will break xyz" "Okay so what does it take to fix xyz?" "maybe a day or two" "..." "It's going to cost more to have xyz" "Oh how much more?" "$100 a month" "..." "It should be blue instead of red" "no customers prefer purple" "alright we will defer this to product team / customer feedback" That bein…
I wonder if this is why there's a rise in A/B testing. We normally see very minor differences, like about 54% vs 46%, but we spend a lot of engineering effort collecting, storing, comparing this data. It seems like something we should just flip a coin over, but I guess it's an anti-bikeshedding method.
Re: Ask HN: Strategies to rein in or prevent bikeshedding?
#20What one of my teams did in the past when things went off topic into an unproductive area was simply call out that it was off topic for the meeting, to shift things back to the main point. At the same time we would add it to a running list of future discussion topics, so they felt heard and the idea wouldn’t get lost, but it didn’t need to derail us in that moment. Most of the stuff we added to that list was never ac…
GitHub comments for issues allow marking as off topic as well, that's a good idea to incorporate into real world meetings too.