The way they sold it sounded a bit culty to me, and the potential for abusive behaviour seemed high. Didn't make me want to work for them.
On the engineering side, ideally this is how things are done anyway.
I've never had a problem digging into the ideas presented by engineers more senior than me, and I've always encouraged junior engineers to question any ideas I present.
Everyone, independent of seniority, is blind to giant gaping flaws in their own ideas. People also don't know what they don't know. If I have a gap in my knowledge, any plans I come up with are not going to take what I don't know into consideration if I don't know that I don't know something.
I've never worked at a place that could reasonably be broad-brushed as a meritocracy. Every company employs humans, and humans bring their humanness to their jobs.
Some places are closer to a real meritocracy than others, but ones that think they are tend to be further from it than ones that don't.
I agree that an engineer is still trapped by social concerns, but not that they're as trapped as anyone else, because anyone who can easily demonstrate that they're right, even if they aren't listened to and even if they can only demonstrate it in some specific areas, has an advantage over someone who can't.
What put me off about this company was how they sold this as the central idea of their company. It made me wonder what made them think this needed to be pushed so strongly. I tend to be suspicious of overriding ideologies.
- being presented under-cooked ideas so you do the thinking for them.
- too many ideas (which can lead to the first) with an inability to focus
There is a feedback loop for the first where people don't dive too deeply into their idea because they know they'll get a lot of criticism.
The second can be bad because the idea or its implementation is never polished.
This is true. On the best team I was ever on, the team leader was respected by everyone and he also mediated conflicts. At the same time, he was incredibly open to new ideas and points of view, and would gladly spent days thinking about what people said to him before coming to a conclusion.
On multiple occasions I made proposals that were in direct conflict with what he had proposed, and he took the time to think my ideas over and give thoughtful feedback, and also on many occasions we came to either compromise, or he changed his mind based on the technical evidence presented.
I guess what I'm saying is, if you have someone in the team that everyone looks up to, and who everyone respects both technically and personally, then that one single person can define the culture for the team.
Do you consider honest disagreement (whether about facts or about priorities) to be "conflict"? That is something that always happens, but secret nonalignment doesn't always have to happen.
Treating all ideas as valid is fine if that means all ideas get evaluated. For hierarchy you need somebody who can be the decision maker when a consensus cannot be reached otherwise the most stubborn opinionated people become the de facto decision makers. I experienced that situation before and resulted in some very bad implementations and massive tech debt and the people who stuck us with those bad decisions got to avoid responsibility and leave other people cleaning up the mess they created.
It sounded like the kind of idea that would either be awesome if done well, or sheer hell if people did what people often do with otherwise good ideas...