>politeness and conflict avoidance over avoiding actual problems
Those two things are not coupled. You can maintain a sense of politeness in face of conflict. This is the entire basis of Nonviolent Communication, a great book about handling and resolving conflict in such a manner.
It’s extremely effective in my experience and results in overall better clarity and less conversational churn.
>Why would anyone do that if they can't even be called out for messing something up, yet alone being held accountable
You can be, that is in part a definition of accountability and you’re conflating a lack of accountability with some idea that it requires behaving in a manner that may be construed as rude, and that’s simply not true.
So like anything, you hold them accountable. You can do that without being rude.
>In all of those projects and organsiations which value respectful language and inclusivity and all sorts of non-results-oriented crap
I’m getting a sense you have a predisposition to disliking these things. They’re really important because they are, when correctly understood, results oriented. It frees up people to feel comfortable saying things they may not have been otherwise. That is very productive.
Abusive and abrasion language does not do that.
>This is how you get design-by-committee lowest common denominator slop
No, in my experience and many reports from others you get this for a myriad of reasons, but consistent theme is lack of ownership or organizational politics, not because people level up their communication skills
>avoid criticising their ideas because they might feel offended". There was a recent HN thread about AI-written pull requests and how people have problems with them, because tactfully rejecting 10k lines of pure bullshit is very hard without making the submitter upset. Guess what, if they were allowed to say "no, you aren't going to be merging slop you can't even explain" the average code quality would skyrocket
I don’t disagree with you because I don’t believe in proper criticism, I do. I disagree with you because the implicit messaging I’m getting here is the following
- you sometimes have to be a jerk
- therefore it’s okay to be a jerk sometimes
- somehow having an expectation of treating others with respect somehow equates to poor accountability
I’ve spent a good chunk of my years learning a lot about effective communication and none of it is about avoiding accountability, of yourself or others. It’s about respecting each other and creating an environment where you can talk about tough things and people are willing to do it again because they were treated respectfully