Dealing with Unreasonable People
No engineering or management technique will be effective if you’re working with unreasonable people.
Published in
6 min readNov 18, 2024
From time to time, you might encounter someone at work who strikes you as being unreasonable. It could be a fellow team member, a manager, a customer, or some other collaborator. I’ve met several such people in my software engineering career, including these:
- A team leader who expected a team member to handle five 8-hour activities per week on different projects, not understanding that multitasking involves inefficiencies
- A customer who insisted that she could provide requirements for a user class to which she didn’t belong, not acknowledging that her experience with that other user class’s work was years out of date
- A coworker who hoarded knowledge instead of sharing it with his colleagues in his attempt to maintain an advantage over people he saw as being his competition
- A senior manager who expected to alter the culture in a large organization by decreeing a set of new processes, not understanding that culture change is slow and requires different tactics than process changes
When you encounter someone who doesn’t seem to be reasonable, that’s not a technical problem — it’s a people problem…
