Don’t point out something wrong immediately

I have experienced lower levels of trust and worsen proficiency in giving and receiving feedback described in this article since the whole WFH thing started, especially as teams at my employer change and we bring on new team members. People are a lot more sensitive, everyone collaborates less and we are accepting a lot of bad code into our projects than ever before. We had about 1/3 of a crucial team leave recently. At their exit interviews they all described how one of the reasons they left is because the code base has turned into a pile of junk and no one wants to work on it.

I recently agreed to join this team to help turn it around because I have a reputation for ensuring good engineering practices and giving feedback is a strength of mine. But boy, this environment is challenging with developers all working from home. I'm curious if this resonates with anyone else, specifically if others have similar experiences with wfh.

But our codebase has become progressively worse because nobody tells the truth about their experience. There are teams making bad choices which throw other teams off the cliff. Sometimes product managers come up with elaborate projects without due diligence only to waste 6 months of engineering time.

Because of such activities, engineers lost faith in their team/org. They just coast or switch teams/companies or straight up lie to management.

There is zero incentive for anyone to improve anything because pointing something out is bad for "optics".

Which sounds like a refutation of the validity of this inference altogether, but—no, take heart: It still works, because it turns out every organization has a broken system or process or larger organizational dysfunction.

So in a sense yes, this logic works, but you can save yourself some steps.

The problem is that people doing the " wrong" thing (with varying degrees of wrong, which I did too and still do) will think they are right, they will usually do a presentation of their solution to people that are less knowledgeable than they are to win the "this was the only practical way given the time we had and also it works" (kinda, if we don't count when it fails) argument, lure them in their teams, keep pushing out half baked solutions that they will then rewrite "to improve them" for karma points, wasting everybody's time and company money.

It works because there are always processes that are worse than bad software.

So bad software usually is not the worse thing you can find in a company and can always blame some other department for being horribly inefficient, everybody wins, salaries are paid every month and 2 years later nobody knows what "the thing" does and why.

But it's an excuse not not do better when it's possible.

a task that takes half an hour can't take 12 days and 6 meetings "so we can talk about it" they say, truth is they are simply pushing their view.

I get people are different and have different incentives, but we don't let people like me go into space just because we shouldn't point out a problem when we see it

Software development is about being as thorough as possible while also being flexible.

I always wonder why we keep asking people who see the problem to stay quiet while people causing them are encouraged to keep making them, so they can learn.

What if people doing the "wrong" thing start listening and do what they are told and if it doesn't work they can blame who said them they were wrong?

Saying no sometimes makes you the lonliest person in the office, but somebody gotta do it or nothing will ever change.