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Comment by rgrieselhuber | Hacker News Reader

The best advice I got early in my career on this topic was: “Nobody serious is going to take you seriously if you give one option as the ‘way it has to be.’ Everything has trade-offs, you will be much more effective as a communicator if you list a few options, along with their trade-offs (and be honest about these). You can even have your preferred / recommended option but it also must come with trade-offs.”

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One of the problems I often see is that when trying to explain one of the possible options, people don't understand it. When that happens, you try to explain it to them harder. Your explanation is then mistaken for pushing for that option. It's important to carefully navigate around this perception. People should understand that first you just want to be on the same page what your options are, and then discuss the best one.

My approach to that has always been to make sure I'm calling my assumptions with a possible option, usually that's either the use cases we care about or the scaling/infrastructure concerns.

I learned pretty early on that its really easy for that context to be lost and that miscommunication go missed. Its so much easier to catch miscommunication early when a few extra seconds or minutes are spent calling out the context and assumptions that make one option best.

This is good sometimes, other times it risks losing the audience. Extra info works better when they're ready (i.e. asked for it). This is why it's such a difficult balancing act. You don't want to preemptively answer questions that people didn't realize they should ask yet.

For sure, I was mainly thinking about later stage discussions where decisions like tech stack, architecture, or infrastructure should really be made.

Early on its often all about use cases and users you're trying to reach. If microservices versus monoliths becomes much of a debate that early engineering is probably getting too far ahead of the product IMO.

I usually have my assumptions written, so I can flip to them quickly if there is any confusion

Very true. It can be hard to properly articulate a position without feeling like you’re being too aggressive, I struggle with this a lot.

Well, you mileage can vary. I see trade-off almost everywhere but many managers are not exited to hear about trade-offs and want to get a perfect solution when you don’t need to sacrifice anything. Though it is not as bad as a manager who already made a decision ignoring trade-offs of different options.

Unfortunately there are a lot of non-serious people in the industry.

I do this instinctively but I feel like I'm coming across as confused and unsure.

That's how I give advice and it can be a huge struggle when working with people out of their element, or in a job they frankly didn't earn.

It's really the only way a productive design conversation can go, but those who can't contribute from their side of the fence will get frustrated. Saying things like "you just need to tell me what to do".

On the flip side, those who think they know better will have pretty much already made up their mind. Which makes things even worse if they don't know better, but for the competent ones this is the easiest and most effective setup of them all.

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