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Comment by alexfromapex | Hacker News Reader

I've been guilty of this at times but what I would add is a certain type of environment encourages this behavior. If the business or teammates are very reluctant to let engineers work on what they want or give harsh feedback it encourages people to retreat into their safe space and try to create something they feel is worthy of feedback.

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I think there's a new phenomenon that needs to be addressed: poor WFH communication channels. By encouraging radio silence, so as to not "interrupt anyone", things get missed.

Also some people feel the need to tightly control group chat. Either content (no "offtopic"), membership, or # of rooms. Some chat platforms encourage this by restricting who can create/manage rooms or how rooms are linked together (discoverability).

It's an unexplored area of knowledge for most people in the new WFH life everyone's leading.

Or if teams are uncommunicative you can end up with not getting a usable response on concerns raised, need to march at some point and without feedback you decide to march in the direction that seems most reasonable to you. Later on it turns out that was right into the swamp.

Can confirm. My lead is pretty picky with everything and expects 110% correctness. Even if my solutions works, is maintainable and extensible it is not how they would've implemented it, so it's no good. Argumentation is sometimes pretty artificial where some made up rules are the gold standard. That plus comments like "that is bad style" (for something that I've seen in all my past jobs + in a lot of OS code) make me not really want to loop them in.

But the job pays well and has interesting problems to solve, so I guess I will put up with it for some time more.

Yes. I do this because interactions with others are a net negative at my place of work. In terms of quantifiable rewards, 99% of interactions are +5 or +10, etc, mixed in with the occasional -15000. In the end the expected value of interactions is negative. All because of one or two very bad interactions a year; the rest being positive, but close to neutral.

What kind of interactions are those extremely negative ones, if you don’t mind elaborating?

Most recent was learning we weren't implementing something in the way that was expected, which required a lot of rework and sparked conversations among management that our team was incompetent. We were completely blindsided by it all, leading to a feeling that any interaction might randomly turn into a similar debacle.

But, when things go well they say "good job", so that's nice.

The original post contains

> It can also happen if the team culture is toxic and engineers fear getting criticism early in the design process.

I think the author would agree with you.

i do agree

Y-e-p. It's not like these retreats happen in a vacuum.

I'll be honest - half the time it's trying to keep it from other engineers who are overly eager to have an opinion because a) they're low-output and looking to posture, and/or b) or want things to be done a different way.

At least the business side of the house appreciates the spec'd work being accomplished.

Intentionally not communicating things in order to prevent bikeshedding is a dangerous game to play and a symptom of a broken environment, but that doesn't mean it's not sometimes a valid approach.

Agree - and it 100% comes from broken teams/environments/people. In engineering, I find most teams are more invested in tearing each other down more-so than building each other up - that's admittedly very anecdotal and personal to me.

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