Nobody wants to communicate because it is pointless to communicate: what you say will be misunderstood, it will be repeated incorrectly and attributed to you, people will play games with your messaging and with you for trying to communicate.
The management bully game activates, and they all participate in keeping the engineer down.
This is normal at every engineering organization, it is lord of the flies.
And this is how we educate people, This situation is created. All because we refuse to recognize that learning how to debate controversy and learning how to manage disagreement is completely unrecognized as a valued skill.
So we avoid controversy and any disagreement is an opportunity to bully and force one's way. Which is completely avoidable, with basic effective communications training. Debate to understand, disagree to learn.
Not sure how it is doing now about listening to programmers because it was sold off by the parent company and then became really successful and grew a lot, so it is essentially a different company.
I have a feeling it is less likely to listen to things now though.
Now they're just trying to reduce us to idiots shovelling coal (specs) into the furnace (LLMs)
There are some smaller businesses and selectively structured ones where that's not the case but for the most part organizations keep engineers from interacting with the customers enough to really know what the customers need and want.
There are some cases where a savvy engineer can say "well if I unify X then it'll be trivial to make Y self service and that'll make redundant an entire category of support tickets" or "we've been getting a lot of requests for X, maybe Y should be extensible so that those can be trivially accommodated" but by and large engineering teams are not positioned to have the knowledge to identify these things. And this is mostly an intentional organizational architecture decision.