About positive antagonist

About me

Hi, my name is Evgeny. I've been working with data and product in tech companies such as Uber, Zoox, and now Netflix. Some time ago, I started feeling an itch to write up my thoughts and observations about dynamics and phenomena I see, and to share them with a broader community, hoping to find more like-minded people to discuss them with.

So, if you find these posts interesting, feel free to reach out! This site's main goals are to start an interesting conversation, build a community, and share ideas.

Why positive antagonist?

I have a particular style of working and communication. I care deeply about my work and always try my best. I also like challenging the status quo and getting to the bottom of questions like:

What exactly are we trying to achieve?
Is there a better way to go about it?
Why do we think this is (or is not) going to happen?

I'm often dissatisfied with the answers I've received, so I make my dissatisfaction known and keep pushing until I get a better answer.

As a result, when I was changing teams at Netflix, my manager said that during my time on the team, I served as a "positive antagonist", driving significant positive change, while challenging the team and often pushing them outside of their comfort zone.

I got intrigued by this term, as I've never heard of it before, and a quick Google search has not yielded anything either. So I went to the source of knowledge of last resort, ChatGPT (that's sarcasm), which gave me the following explanation of what that means:

Positive antagonism refers to a concept or strategy where opposition or disagreement is used constructively to stimulate debate, encourage diverse viewpoints, or engance problem-solving.
It's about harnessing dynamic of conflict or competition to drive positive change.

That explanation resonated with me, so I embraced this strategy and named my blog after it.

To be clear, I don't believe that being a "brilliant jerk" is ever an acceptable strategy. To me, it's mostly about being kind rather than "nice".