[microsoftdoes]

People are a variety of ways. A healthy culture can accommodate that variety within reason. I reckon we’ve become a little too focused on agreeableness as a culture. Not that you should strive to be an asshole. But some people are just naturally blunt and abrasive. And that’s okay. A lot of the trouble is in people’s reactions to that, since thick skin seems to be on long-term decline too.

I’m not sure we’re disagreeing about anything. What you wrote is good advice to someone who’s too argumentative.

[JamesSwift]

Right, but its basically hoping that human nature fundamentally changes rather than just not making big deals about things which dont matter. The article is a great example. The anecdote is that he argued aggressively against "IF, THEN, ELSE" because its _grammatically incorrect_ even though every other language used it. He suggests "IF, THEN, OR", which is _just as bad but also different_! So now we are wasting time/energy debating this thing and the suggestion isnt even good! So how am I supposed to interpret this as the "non arguer" in this scenario? That you put the quality of the product first, or that you just want to "win" the argument in _every single scenario_? I'm likely to interpret it as the latter and now we are in a worse spot as a team because, again, I can't assume you are not just arguing for the sake of arguing in the future.