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I had an interesting case a few years back... I was supposed to follow the spec exactly. However, in all the UI/UX diagrams myself and team were given, there was no “close window” or “back buttons”. This included things like pop up notifications. I went ahead and implemented it anyway. Then sent them to the design team to ask if I should remove (took under an hour of work). I was later reprimanded for not following the spec, BUT they kept my implementation and design.

This is one experience that sticks out because I was reprimanded. However, I’d say every project I’ve been on has been at least 10% of the the final project designed & implemented by engineers on the spot.

Beyond UI design decisions engineering can have a major impact on UX. Every single function can make-or-break the experience. That’s why we, as engineers, wield a lot of power.

I would've gone against them: either you reprimand me and we take out the feature, or we keep it and then you thank me.

Exactly my thinking, totally irresponsible behavior on the part of design team

At that point it's best to find a new employer. It sounds like there was some weird ego game being played.

On small things like this it’s easy to just gaslight people into thinking they told you it was ok. You can just explain it was such a small detail they probably don’t remember you brought it up and they said it was ok. If they say no, just double down and keep insisting and as long as there are no records of your conversations you will win.

Lol the problem with gaslighting is not that it’s not easier in some contexts but that it is an actual act of aggression

For a more cynical take on why GP's advice is bad, it also breaks down trust in communication. If I catch you trying to gaslight me once I have to run all of your future statements through a more strict truthiness parser in my head, and I'll place less trust in statements you make that are actually true. People who perceive themselves as smarter than the average bear can sometimes believe that they possess the mental prowess to lie without being caught, and this is often true, but the one time it isn't true it can have devastating effects on interpersonal relationships and communication. I don't even judge people negatively for all lies, if you lie about a detail of your personal life while in a work setting there could be totally understandable privacy reasons for that where a non-answer would have a different effect than a hard "no." But if you lie about prior decision making processes, that breaks down trust in the exact domain that we need trust in. It poisons the well, and that isn't worth a little less friction in one specific decision making process.

Trust goes both ways, if you are going to reprimand me in the future for implementing a needed feature but then go ahead and use it anyway and even take credit for it then I will gaslight you next time the same problem comes up.

I don't know all the details of your specific situation, but from what I've read it does seem that your superior was in the wrong. As others have noted, this is a situation where it might be clever to look for a new employer. That being said I don't think passive aggressive lies and manipulation are a smart response. I also don't think that the actions of your superior break down communication in the same way that gaslighting does. Reprimanding somebody while still eventually using their idea can be recognized as an asshole move whether or not it affects "trust." Being an asshole isn't a great trait in a work environment, or life in general for that matter, but I know plenty of assholes who I still probabilistically trust not to lie to me. Finally, and I'm not saying this is the case in your specific negative experience, I can imagine scenarios where some light reprimand might be useful even if the idea implemented is ultimately accepted, like, "hey, that was a good idea, but it affects something above your paygrade and we really want you to go through this process[0] when making these sorts of decisions in the future." I don't think that applies to your back buttons, but I can imagine scenarios where accepting an idea while lightly reprimanding a failure to communicate during the decision making processes could make sense.

Edit: I can see how the "and even take credit" part breaks down trust in a similar way. I still don't think further trust-destruction is a clever response. I would leave, call them out on the lie, or (if not in a position to risk unemployment by pissing off a superior) bite my tongue and try to rise through the ranks.

Other edit: typo.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19832774

Retribution is a terrible concept to bring into your workplace relationships. Two wrongs don’t make a right, try to take the high road. Cliché but true.

Half of my current job as the EM of a team is making my manager think he came up with critical ideas and tech specs for the things we work on. This is a useful skill to manage up with in engineering organizations that have severe organizational and leadership problems.

I've dealt with a designer before that said very literally and in no uncertain terms that there was no need for me to be involved in the high level feature design because he only needed to talk to the frontend engineer "actually implementing it" -- deeply ironic, given this feature was 95% core backend engineering, and so was in my wheelhouse. And so I ended up silently building the feature the way I suggested, and although he hemmed and hawed, he (and the rest of the team) later on conceded I was right.

FWIW, I view this more a failure of product management than anything. This should never have become an argument or adversarial interaction between engineering and design, and it's occurrence was to me a sign that things had procedurally failed quite a bit earlier. I'm happy I was able to save the project and get it to a successful launch (and certainly took the commensurate amount of credit), but I do wish some designers and product folks had more of a sense of awareness for how frequently this happens.

I think the most interesting things to create are often the work of groups of people who all have very different areas of expertise. Everybody's working together towards the same final product, but everyone has their own mental model of how that process works, and no one person can really see the full picture (like the story about the blind men and the elephant).

I've worked in different sorts of crossfunctional teams over the years at different companies in different industries- sometimes the other people are designers, or scientists, or people from other engineering disciplines who aren't down in the weeds like I am on the software side of things. Or sometimes they're the customers/clients/whatever, and are making specifications in a technical vacuum.

I think it's 100% pure human nature to always assume that one's own piece is the most complicated or meaningful part of a project, whereas other people's roles are more straightforward implementation details. I don't think it's from selfishness or conceit, rather it's plain old cognitive bias that we're all susceptible to. You know much more about all the stuff that needs to be done in your part of the system, and are painfully aware of the risks and challenges. You generally don't know nearly as much about the tasks other people are doing in other layers or fields, and from the outside looking in, it seems like everything is always more simple and straightforward than it actually is.

Even people like managers or designers who generally aren't concerned with minute technical details are susceptible to this type of cognitive bias. They play much more creative roles, in which they're literally deciding what the final thing is going to be, but with little or no guidance for how it should be done. That's up to the worker elves who have to assemble the component parts into the desired gizmo. Since the worker elves' reason for employment is assembling parts into gizmos, the people playing more purely creative roles always face a moral hazard of assuming that problems assembling their visions are due to failings of the worker elves themselves, rather than inherent weaknesses in the vision.

I kinda left off my conclusions from all of that: obviously you don't want a situation where (like in the designer vs web developer example), designers are empowered to dictate designs which would naturally result in poor implementations, and you don't want a situation where designers are subject to the whims of what the engineers do and don't feel like doing, and do or don't know how to do.

So how do you avoid those nonconstructive relationships? IMO/IME, you either need your specialists to have at least some intuition for what the other specialists do, or, failing that, you need to make sure that one group isn't politically empowered over any of the other ones. No one should be dictating terms to anyone else, everyone should have some ability to push back on things they disagree with, but at the same time if there's a clear consensus on something, one lone holdout can't stop the train. Pushing back on pusher-backers has to be possible too, when appropriate and necessary.

I don't think it's a bad thing to have specialists that have intuition about what other specialists do; in fact, that's a core responsibility for being a senior individual contributor. But, (and I covered this in my original comment), I think that this mediating labor is the role of product management, and there is a reason why product management is 100% a full-time job that cannot be skimped out on. I never understood why it needed to exist when I first started in my career, or I thought it was mostly a status-signaling BS role. However, the only way to mitigate that natural tendency of individuals to assume "it's 100% pure human nature to always assume that one's own piece is the most complicated or meaningful part of a project" is for a technical product manager to actually own the ramifications of all design and engineering decisions that are made and orienting the resultant product properly to the longterm strategic goals of the company. There is no substitute. Engineering and design direction are full-time roles in and of theirselves, and so too is product.

Reminds me the funny/painful pic of 'Profile updated successfully' inside an obvious error dialog.

If I was writing surgery robot software I very much would want a surgeon sitting next to me, or at the very least available for a chat on a reasonably short order. Collaboration is a force multiplier. Unavailability of domain knowledge is a major reason why so much domain-specific software sucks.

"Theoretically" agile means that you have an easy access to the customer to help you with decision making and changing requirements.

Unfortunately its VERY rare to meet that requirement for agile (multiple reasons).

For mission critical projects like the one you mention, I think, company should pay good money even to few surgeons to be available for the devs.

Problem often lies in management to understand that..

Yep, and that’s one of the reasons I feel I’m pretty much done with programming as a day jon.

I'd want a surgeon who extensively used the previous version of the surgery robot. :)

I've never had a spec that would thoroughly describe how to handle every case. The ability to understand and interpolate vague business requirements is expected to scale with your level; if you take a "not my job" approach to such decision-making you are perpetually entry-level.

I've often seen the exact opposite of this: entry-level devs being all too happy to 'fill in the gaps' in a spec based on their own (very limited) understanding of the problem domain (not even being fully aware of where the spec ends and their interpretation begins), and more senior people recognizing when they don't actually know the answer and realizing that it's important enough to clarify with the domain expert. Basically Dunning-Kruger effect.

> agile projects with tight deadlines

If you're not deciding on the sensible deadline, you're not self-managing your project, you're not doing agile.