> My recommendation to mid-level, senior, and staff engineers is to keep questioning decisions and create a culture where that’s encouraged.
Tell me you've never worked at FAANG without telling me you've never worked at FAANG...
Tell me you've never worked at FAANG without telling me you've never worked at FAANG...
What isn’t viewed positively is when you refuse to accept a decision after it’s been made and your concerns have been heard. People get pissed if you keep relitigating the same points over and over again
Your job is to make sure that the decision makers, when they're not you, have the information needed to make competent decisions. You should keep arguing when (a) there is credible reason to believe that important information has not been heard or understood or (b) when new information has come to light that you credibly believe might change the decision. In the absence of those two, your should accept that you have done your job and should let your managers to theirs, even if you disagree with them. Bring it back up when (a) or (b) changes, and not until.
I think this comes down to how you go about asking. You have to take the time to understand what is and how it's seen by others by being curious, reading docs, etc instead of rolling in making assertions disguised as questions to assert authority like so many are wont to do.
I suppose it's possible that I'm the designated court jester and that's why I can get away with questioning, but I don't think that's the case :)
Some of the biggest accidents have happened directly due to this. Like Tenerife where the flight engineer had been listening to the radio and raised doubts about the runway being free but was ignored by the overconfident captain.
Is this a bad thing though? If some technical decision has downside risk, I’d reasonably expect:
- the affected stakeholder to bring it up
- the decision maker to assuage the stakeholder’s concern (happy path) or triage and escalate
As important as I think questioning is, there’s another side of it where people push their own agenda with questions on topics that were decided by other/more senior people hashing it out. At some point this does need to be dealt with. All I see is the yapping questions wasting meeting time, though.
It takes months of dysfunction until the customer says "I do not want to work with you anymore" or until the "overtime and over budget" thing suddenly becomes too large and problems show up in numbers. Or until key team suddenly completely decomposes. Every single time I have seen that, multiple people tried to communicate about the issue and were shot down.
It is not like management was always "wholistically" right and everyone down there just dont see big picture or have bad arguments - they usually just do not know what is going on on lower levels. Failure to actually listen, whether because it feels bad or because it would take time is quite common.
I did work at Stripe, which in places did this pretty well. It still felt like a huge company (this was back in 2022) that had lost part of that spirit depending on org leadership. I had to pull that out of engineers who had been scared out of that level of vulnerability. But building that trust is part of leadership and great people tend to want to question and improve things.
I've given talks on work/life balance -- and I stand by those talks enough to argue with directors and above when needed, though it rarely is -- and an important part of that talk is about how much better it can look when you can intelligently describe the limits of your knowledge, skills, and estimation.
If you get penalized for that, you're just in a shit role with a shit manager. Don't project that on the rest of us.