It reads like a glass half empty. The half full maybe to let people know what you say "yes" to. Carrot and stick.

I personally don’t deal well with evasive behavior, asking or being asked.

Yes it is glass half empty and intentionally so. The point is that it takes time to reason about problems, understand more than individual perspectives and evaluate solutions to problems. I have shot myself so many times in the past by having a quick answer to a question even if I was previously convinced it was a good idea.

As for letting people know what you say yes to, all problems need the same evaluation therefore which leads to assumptions that you will say yes. Sometimes people don't ask and just assume. Another road to hell.

It's not evasive either. There's nothing to say that you're not going to sit there and work through it with them, engage with other people and come up with a solution based on pooled ideas.

Perhaps I should say I never say yes or no until the adequate amount of research has been done.

Working these things out in real-time in the presence of conflict and tension is an immeasurably valuable life skill. If you don't practice it, you'll never get better.

Consider your wife's coffee maker conversation practice for times where the stakes are much higher.

Interesting. Could you give an example of rephrasing and being tricky/evasive?

My wife is a fine example:

Problem: coffee machine not working.

Her representation of the problem: we need to buy a new coffee machine.

Really what’s going on: coffee machine needs cleaning properly but it doesn’t match the rest of the stuff in the kitchen now.

Edit: I'm sure this analogy probably works better for the folk downvoting when you look at it in terms of computation. Perhaps I should have write "the developer wants to rewrite this function as a microservice" whereas the real problem is "we need to fix this defect".

The real thing is the developer wants to write a new shiny microservice full of new bugs rather than actually fix the damn bugs. Same as my wife wants a new shiny coffee machine but doesn't want to clean the old one (which is a shitty job, which I did in the end anyway because I made the faulty decision of saying yes to myself too quickly. I also fixed the bug)

There are 2 problems: The coffee machine doesn't work, AND it doesn't match the kitchen. Possibly 3, the machine is high maintenance. In your comment, you neglected 2 of those problems.

Yes, there's a bug in the production services, but maybe it's a nightmare to maintain and there are more and more bugs creeping in and a microservice might help make it more stable - and maybe the developers want more experience with new tech to grow professionally as well.

It seems like communication is missing in both cases. It is easy to try to guess the other’s person motivations, but it’s actually hard to be 100% correct, and even if we’re 100% correct, who says our motivation is more valid than the other’s person? sure sometimes our motivation is objectively better, but the other person won’t agree without communication.

Probably after reading “No More Mr Nice Guy” everyone should read “How to Win Friends and Influence People”

The real issue is that your wife is in control of the kitchen, if she wants to buy a new machine that looks nicer, she is the boss and you shouldn't be arguing. :)