It’s Sunday night and I’m completely unmotivated to write something coherent and interesting for tomorrow’s (i.e. today’s) post. Instead, I offer this oldie but goody from the Way Back Machine that they title Things to say when you’re losing a technical argument. We’ve all been in, say, a code review or planning meeting and experienced being the recipient of one of these tropes.
They’re all the sure sign of an ankle biter. By “ankle biter”, I mean one of those annoying people who has nothing of value to contribute but nonetheless feel obligated to raise silly objections to everyone else’s suggestions. If you can’t think of a real objection, what better to say than, “That won’t scale”? If you look at the list, they’re all like that: they sound technically astute but actually have no meaning in the situations in which they’re used.
Probably the best defense is to ask the ankle biter to elaborate on and explain the objection. If the objector is, in fact, an ankle biter, they almost certainly won’t be able to and you can move on.