ALTERNATE UNIVERSE DEV

CodePen Radio

#313: Conflict

Being, ya know, human beings with thoughts and emotions trying to build something together, sometimes we clash. There are big clashes. Sometimes those end in drastic changes. We’ve done that. You might have noticed that we’re down to two co-founders actively at the company. There are tiny clashes too, like needing to tell someone when they’ve made a mistake. Medium clashes (this is not a real classification by the way, it’s just how it feels) are when multiple people feel pretty strongly about something and are not in alignment. It’s not much of a clash if one person is at a 3 and the other is at a 9 on the care-o-meter. When you’re both 10’s, it’s a clash of conflict. That happens to us sometimes (again, humans). The tricky part is that conflict resolution is never straightforward. If someone feels strongly that the direction should be A, another feels the direction should be B, sometimes the solution is C for compromise. But sometimes compromise weakens a vision, and resolution needs to be A or B so that the vision itself isn’t weakened.

Are we experts in this? Far from it. Have we thought about it a lot? Ages. Do we have a long way to go in getting better at this? Sure do. The fact that we all still have extremely different temperaments for conflict at all is part of what makes it hard.

Timestamps

  • 01:08 History of conflict at CodePen
  • 02:03 Founder conflict
  • 05:59 Meeting conflict
  • 11:51 Learning to deal with conflict
  • 18:20 Figuring out where the conflict actually is
  • 23:37 Sponsor: Netlify
  • 25:09 How we approached conflict now vs in the beginning
  • 34:47 Honesty in conflict

Sponsor: Netlify

It’s worth reading up on Netlify’s new concept of Distributed Persistent Rendering (DPR) and how that works with On-demand builders. It might just make your existing Jamstack builds way faster and better, or make possible the Jamstack for something you thought could never be.

Episode source