Shooting down ideas is not a skill • Hacker News Board

Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill

#91

Post by DavidPiper » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 2:54 AM UTC

dsr_ wrote: post #49

> "I haven't heard any customers request this." "We can't use Python for that, it's too slow." "That introduces too much complexity." "We tried something like that before and it didn't work." "DevOps won't want to support another service." "People are used to the way it works now." > None of these people are wrong or stupid. And none of them have added any value. Bzzt. Since all of these people are correct and smart,…

> People don't want change? Nah, people like change when it is obvious to them that the change is good.

I agree with some of what you said, but just want to point out that you're doing the very thing you criticise here.

I think lots of people genuinely don't want change. Hopefully you have great answers to my objection.

In general, I've found the question of "who needs to provide evidence first?" is one of the most casually ignored and maliciously manipulated questions in so much professional discourse. The answer is often implicitly "the person with less role power" which by itself is a terrible answer.

Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill

#92

Post by phillipcarter » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 2:56 AM UTC

dsr_ wrote: post #49

> "I haven't heard any customers request this." "We can't use Python for that, it's too slow." "That introduces too much complexity." "We tried something like that before and it didn't work." "DevOps won't want to support another service." "People are used to the way it works now." > None of these people are wrong or stupid. And none of them have added any value. Bzzt. Since all of these people are correct and smart,…

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Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill

#93

Post by Aperocky » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 2:57 AM UTC

There is a balance somewhere.

I've met some people in my professional life where they shoot down virtually every single idea that come across them. And as a result they were right sometimes, never made a bug, and made the team around them extremely slow.

I will gladly shoot down any idea for unnecessary complexity and unnecessary feature, but otherwise it's "where's the demo"?

Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill

#94

Post by phil21 » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 2:57 AM UTC

dsr_ wrote: post #49

> "I haven't heard any customers request this." "We can't use Python for that, it's too slow." "That introduces too much complexity." "We tried something like that before and it didn't work." "DevOps won't want to support another service." "People are used to the way it works now." > None of these people are wrong or stupid. And none of them have added any value. Bzzt. Since all of these people are correct and smart,…

> People don't want change? Nah, people like change when it is obvious to them that the change is good.

I agree with more or less everything but this one.

I would modify it.

People don't want change? Nah, people like change when it is obvious to them that the change is good for them personally.

You can introduce a change that would be great for the organization and customers, but totally eliminate the current project a team has been working on unsuccessfully for years. You will be shot down no matter how good your idea is. And many times, there is no way to turn it into a "win" for the team that you need to win over to your side due to politics.

So shooting down ideas - for that team - is indeed a skill. A self-preservation skill. I've seen teams able to employ this skill for nearly a decade where it was obvious to any outside observer there were numerous ideas that would eliminate their need to exist altogether.

Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill

#95

Post by patrakov » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 3:05 AM UTC

dminik wrote: post #18

An idea can also reduce value. Or prevent you from producing value in the future. Knowing when an idea is bad or not worth doing is a skill in itself.

Exactly. "Doing it this way would prevent us from also doing X in the future; are we sure to permanently cross X from the roadmap, and are stakeholders aware?" is a valid and valuable objection. EDIT: and it can be trivially shot down by somebody with enough authority to define a roadmap saying, "we don't care about doing X".

Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill

#96

Post by torben-friis » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 3:07 AM UTC

loose-cannon wrote: post #86

dsr_ wrote: post #49

> "I haven't heard any customers request this." "We can't use Python for that, it's too slow." "That introduces too much complexity." "We tried something like that before and it didn't work." "DevOps won't want to support another service." "People are used to the way it works now." > None of these people are wrong or stupid. And none of them have added any value. Bzzt. Since all of these people are correct and smart,…

There is value in critically evaluating ideas and possible endeavors. On the other hand, demanding an answer to every little pocket of uncertainty creates a huge burden that prevents exploration. It's one thing to be exhaustive in the criticism by examining individual scenarios, evaluating cost benefit in a measurable way, etc. That doesn't seem to be what the author is describing. He's describing critical & low effo…

>On the other hand, demanding an answer to every little pocket of uncertainty creates a huge burden that prevents exploration.

How do you explore an idea, other than trying to shoot it down and seeing if it survives the shot?

Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill

#97

Post by robocat » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 3:10 AM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #62

Meh, those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. You shouldn't listen to every nay-sayer. Sometimes criticism is not convincing and it can be a skill separating out useful criticism from unconvincing criticism. However if someone did X in the past and ran into problem Y, you should probably have an answer to why Y is not a problem for your use case or what you plan to do differently to avoid Y. If you…

> those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it

This is a classic meta shutdown - the exact thoughtless criticism the article rails against.

Make the future, deal with the relevant mistakes one discovers on one's path.

There is an infinite number of mistakes to make. It doesn't help to waste oodles of time learning about mistakes made by others under different contexts and constraints.

Avoiding mistakes is hard. Listening, nous and intuition can help. The biggest trick is to learn how to deal with mistakes as they occur (no matter how obvious they might be to someone with sufficient art).

The biggest mistake is to have too much fear of mistakes to even begin a venture.

Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill

#98

Post by majormajor » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 3:18 AM UTC

torben-friis wrote: post #96

loose-cannon wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is value in critically evaluating ideas and possible endeavors. On the other hand, demanding an answer to every little pocket of uncertainty creates a huge burden that prevents exploration. It's one thing to be exhaustive in the criticism by examining individual scenarios, evaluating cost benefit in a measurable way, etc. That doesn't seem to be what the author is describing. He's describing critical & low effo…

>On the other hand, demanding an answer to every little pocket of uncertainty creates a huge burden that prevents exploration. How do you explore an idea, other than trying to shoot it down and seeing if it survives the shot?

By proceeding with things that will gather more data—such as prototyping, or further independent research—vs spinning indefinitely on "hypothetical" discussion-only shots.

How do you know if it survives the shot without that, if it's just person A saying "I don't think Python perf will be an issue" and person B saying "I think it will"?

Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill

#99

Post by zephen » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 3:18 AM UTC

sarchertech wrote: post #61

This is the exact opposite of the theory of bullshit asymmetry. It’s much easier to come up with bullshit than it is to debunk it. The real skill is known which ideas to shoot down or heavily rework, which is probably the most valuable thing a senior engineer brings to the table.

Yes, the author assumes that the idea was carefully vetted and cultivated. If, in fact, that was the case, then, as other commenters have pointed out, the idea's champion should have ready answers to most obvious critiques.

Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill

#100

Post by ehnto » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 3:20 AM UTC

muglug wrote: post #68

gdubs wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrats, you've killed the idea in its infancy because you demanded answers to questions before it could even walk. Ideas need time to be explored, and given a chance.

Sure, but it's sort of dumb for me to bring an idea I value to the table until I have answers to all the obvious questions. I owe it to my colleagues to not make them the bad guys by shooting down an idea.

Really depends on the context I think, brainstorming session? Naysaying does have a habbit of stunting an idea's growth in the session. Sometimes you need to imagine you've solved a bunch of hard problems before you can explore the value the idea has.

I say this as a semi-reformed naysayer. I am critical of implementation plans, but let ideas breath a bit in a more exploratory setting before I start bringing up constraints.