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"Just don't be depressed!"

I had a manager — who I basically loved — that loved to say “assume positive intent”, perhaps from teammate $T

And I tried!

But my priors were that teammate $T has rejected ideas from most of my design documents for (imho) inconsequential reasons — Eg there were framework scalability concerns of using a framework that handles 1x-1000x the projected growth of the current project.

Telling me to “assume positive intent” from feedback saying it wouldn’t work “because scale” (when we were comfortably 4-5 orders of magnitude away from those problems) felt pretty empty.

More honest pushback would essentially be “this solution didn’t need this scale yet”, or “we can afford to re-architect this right now” — “finding deals” becomes a rent payment from someone figured

Ok, so there was a disagreement on how to move forward. How did you resolve it with your teammate?

> It is helpful for one's own mental health to Assume Positive Intent when context is missing from messages. If it is really bad news that the other party wants to discuss, there is nothing you can do about it. You might as well deal with it during/after the discussion. If it is a benign discussion, all your anxiety would have been pointless anyway.

I understand that on an intellectual level, but this doesn't do anything for my anxiety.