TLs: Credential Checking and How to Handle It

When I was a tech lead on an SRE team, I was working with one of our partners and I had been in a stalemate with one of their leads over an architecture decision. We’d been disagreeing on what approach to take for his service, and I couldn’t get him to actually counter my argument. He was side-stepping the key points I was making, rather than helping figure out why that didn’t fully solve the problem so we could iterate. I was getting frustrated. We had worked together just fine before, but some promotion politics had gone down that left me promoted and him still waiting. I respected him but knew he was hurting. I was also kind of exhausted with this, as I had other projects. We were going to come to an impasse soon. 

That is until he found a document about a team that had a similar problem! He was so excited to show it to me. He recommended that we just do what this team had done. It solved everything.

I raised an eyebrow. 

“Can I show you something?” 

I asked him to scroll up to the authors of the document at the top of the page. 

Some color drained out of his face. He looked at me, panicked. “Oh no! Did I do The Thing?”