Being right is not the job

Some articles you read and forget by lunch. Cong Wang’s Why I Stopped Arguing with People stayed with me for days.

His point is simple and a little uncomfortable. Arguing to prove you’re right almost never changes anyone’s mind. The moment a disagreement starts to feel personal, people stop weighing the idea and start defending themselves. After that, logic doesn’t get through. The advice that does land is the kind someone actually asked for.

I’ve watched this play out

Anyone who has spent time in engineering teams has seen it. A design review where two strong engineers go back and forth until one of them wins. The decision that comes out is usually fine. What changes is quieter: the person on the losing side brings fewer ideas to that room, and brings them later, when they’re harder to change.

It shows up in code review too. A correct comment written as a verdict gets a defensive reply. The same point written as a question usually just gets fixed.

And now and then I’ve found myself in that spot. Confident, pushing a point, and realising halfway through that I’d stopped looking for the best answer and started trying to win.

A line from 2,500 years ago

What struck me most was the essay’s reference to Lao Tzu. Chapter 2 of the Tao Te Ching, in James Legge’s translation:

“So it is that existence and non-existence give birth the one to (the idea of) the other; that difficulty and ease produce the one (the idea of) the other.”

“Right” can’t exist without “wrong”. Every time someone insists on being right, they’re also creating someone who is wrong, and that person remembers it. It was written two and a half thousand years ago, and it describes a tense pull-request thread better than most modern management books.

Where this lands for a lead

Here’s where I’d add to the essay. A lead engineer can’t simply stop arguing. Part of the job is making technical decisions stick, including ones some people disagree with. Stepping away from every disagreement wouldn’t be humility. It would be leaving the decision to whoever pushes hardest.

So the lesson isn’t to avoid disagreement. It’s to stop letting disagreement become a contest about who is right. The leads I’ve learned most from do this well. They ask what would have to be true for an idea to work before saying it won’t. They let a quick spike or a benchmark settle the question, so nobody has to lose face to change their mind. They let the easily reversed decisions go and hold firm only on the ones that are expensive to undo. And once a decision is made, they back it, including when it didn’t go their way.

One question worth asking

The essay left me with a question I now try to ask before pushing back on something: am I trying to reach the best decision, or am I trying to be right?

In the moment, those two feel exactly the same. They aren’t.