Comment by hinkley
7 years ago
There's another dimension you can work on that I find seems to work much better.
Put your complaints in the form of a question. People will use whatever internal dialog they are comfortable with to unpack it in their own heads.
Doesn't work on everyone. There's a couple engineers at every job who will happily answer questions about their Rube Goldberg machines as if they were innocent questions instead of an invitation to be introspective.
Rhetorical questions annoy me even more than an opinionated statement. So yeah, YMMV
Rhetorical questions don't require an answer.
Questions like, "How can we have an audit trail for this solution, in case we have to diagnose problems?" demand an answer.
"This is a stupid idea and let me tell you why." invites a rebuttal, not a compromise or a re-think.
Do you think that a complaint in the form of a question is necessarily rhetorical? Couldn't it, in fact, be Socratic?
The way I read or hear it every time there a “you stupid twat”, “haven’t you thought about that eh! Dimwit” closing line.
I can’t help it...
I see what you did there.
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