And this ladies and gentlemen is the over reaction of the year!
So if that is indeed the case here, then it does indicate some problems.
I’m amazed that I’m still talking about this :)
Not only is that a miserable experience, but I think it's also a recipe for a product that only gets worse.
That's the over reaction part. The fact that two engineers feels uncomfortable expressing their feelings, says very little about the culture or values in their company.
It could be that they are just too introverted or insecure to speak up about most things, or that they have a good relationship with the fellow engineers in that other team, and don't feel like ruining it by telling them, that their contributions to the product sucks.
But that's not what was said. It was correctly described as a possible management problem, a signal. If your notion is that one should leave at the first signal, that's something you bring to it.
Anyhow, we have evidence that the problem is more widespread. It's obvious from the HN reaction that quite a lot of people hate this feature, engineers especially. But still it was released. If you want to hypothesize a situation that makes that unimportant, you have to dream up a lot more than two extremely insecure engineers.