This reminds me of a time, many years ago now, another engineer and myself ended up in a debate with one of the executives. We seemed to be in a very strong disagreement with them. After well over an hour of getting nowhere we ended up going back and essentially starting over breaking everything down into little pieces and ensuring our definitions of everything lined up. Turns out we agreed the whole time, but how each side was saying it made us think we did not. I believe it provided me a valuable lesson in this but it was so frustrating at the time and that certainly didn't help the cause. Sometimes I have to remember back to it and to take that step back take a breath and reframe things. How things are being said can really affect the conversation.
Yes, it’s a hard skill to learn, and … it’s why I ask so many questions / make sure we have the same context.
Very often in software engineering, people use abstract words that have been overloaded with meanings in many different ways, and it can be easy to think the other person is suggesting something completely different. I love using diagrams because they remove a lot of the “words”.
