How to Pick Your Battles on a Software Team

Nothing makes me bristle more than having to clean up after mistake that I warned the team not to make in the first place.

My grandfather was imprisoned by the Nazis and later fought for a Trotskist partisan militia. He hated "communists." According to him (as far as I understood), the defining feature of "communist" was fanaticism. The communists at that time, fighting Nazi & Fascist occupations or orchestrating revolutions under their ideological flag were ideological devotees. We remember Nazism and the madness that took a hold of Germany but I think we forget the context. Other ideologies of the period were less of an evil archetype, but not less devoted ideologically. Often they were just as bloody, if not in the same cold way. The communists that played the archetype role in my grandfather's experience (I assume his comrades, but IDK) must have been very fanatical. "A communist is someone who would sacrifice his mother for the cause" was how he'd describe it. This didn't (as far as I know) have much to do with what we might call "socialist" policy now. This wasn't an opinion about economics or social policy.

Anyway... in a software context, the word ideology gets thrown around, often in a derogatory way. It's surprisingly hard to define it. I think a lot of the conflict points (losing battles) alluded to here are likely to have at least one person pissed off at the other's stupid ideology.

"Agile" is the obvious one to bring up. This is mostly because it has a name, it's been successful enough to have beeen bastardized and tortured many times and it has a manifesto. But there are a lot of things like that.

I haven't come up with a good definition, but I think a good chunk of it has to do with this: Ideology is contextual. When you're argueing for 'X' ideologically, you can't explain your reasons without going into a lot of abstract preamble. This is annoying to the people who disagree with the background reasoning and to those that have never looked into it. To them it sounds like you're saying "just because." Ideological bullshit.

In a political context, one might be a libertarian. This has implications about the legal status of recreational ketamine, minimum wages, building codes, school funding and the approval process for new pharmaceuticals. It all ties in logically to the Libertarian perspective. But, if a libertarian is trying to be centrist, pragmatic, get elected or convince others to make laws then they have a choice. They can be "ideological" and talk about non-coercion or emergence or whatever forms the base of their ideological position. This then becomes about the ideology, not the specific thing. Or, they can talk about the specific thing, the law or policy. They can point to some study on minimum wages and unemployment or innovation and regulation in the pharmaceutical sector or whatever. This often feels contrived. That study isn't what convinced the idealist, the ideology convinced him.

I don't know how this gets solved. I do think that it's important to keep a record though. what ideology do I subscribe to. Realize that when you disagree for ideological reasons, that you are entering tricky territory.

As a side note, common ideologies are great for cooperation.

> By definition it can't.

Only if you assume that dysfunction is either a steady state and does not fluctuate, or that there exists two binary states of function and dysfunction, and nothing in between, or both.

If either of those are true, then it's possible to be on a great team (which is itself relative), and still either have aspects that are dysfunctional, or periods where it goes into dysfunction.

> Sure you can have disagreements. So then you all present your arguments figure out which way forward is the best with as little ego thrown in as possible and move on.

Sometimes, when that decision keeps coming back to bite you, and possibly you in particular, you feel the need to keep bringing it up, so others know it's an ongoing problem. That can be seen by others as someone not letting a decision go.

Does that engineering choice that resulted in a somewhat frail system keep coming back to bite you? Congratulations, now you're presented with keeping your mouth shut and just fixing it every time it breaks, or speaking up when it breaks so that people know it's a continual problem, and risk others thinking you are just complaining more, and promoting team dysfunction, or some happy medium, but where is that medium?

I'm not sure what you intend to gain with misinterpreting what I wrote but it makes no sense to me. Enjoy HN.