Don't Get Your Coworker to Agree with You

At the end of the day, the question to ask is: who is responsible for the product? If the product owner/boss/ceo is okay with it, who are you to question it?

What I do is try to talk through the pros/cons of what the other person wants to do. I will try to challenge what they’re doing with data and/or ask them to show me their data. I am open to being wrong at any point in time (ie try not to come across as judgmental or saying it’s a bad thing). Also, if you’ve seen the same thing in the past, walk through what happened and what you think the worst case scenario is.

If your colleague is insecure/anti-social/not interested in learning, you don’t want to work w/ them. I’ve had my share of ‘cowboy’ coders that were ‘moving fast and breaking things’. That’s not sustainable. You need to try to do something about it and not just hopw they will learn their lesson. Huge difference between lack of experience and sloppiness.

Got rid of the co-worker much earlier on, by the sounds of it.

I never understood this logic. How is Kara being offended a smart and socially conscious decision? A better way to handle criticism is to ask for people's opinions and not get defensive.

After reading couple of negotiation and similar articles, I started to try and reason with people with carefully crafted questions to guide them towards my goal. But the end result always is that once people realize what I am trying to do, have them remove an icon, they get defensive irrespective. And then argument ensues.

The only way I found around this was to build trust. And it takes time, you cannot arrive at a company and start a discussion with Kara. Small talk about family etc helps build some trust. Or if systems fails and resolving it without shaming the original developers helps too. This obviously is not perfect because the time you spend building trust, you are also acquiring issues. But it helps in long run.