Creativity and critical thinking. In subordinate position it gets you labelled a dreamer, a weirdo, or an idiot.

In executive position, visionary, maverick, multidisciplinary thinker, etc.

You can only truly creative in a position with autonomy, so you either climb the ladder or start your own thing.

A chapter from The Originals talks about that. Specifically a junior CIA agent who got sidelined for her suggestions and ideas, only to have them taken seriously once she was senior enough.

nailed it. corporations can't handle grassroots change, so the values which promote grassroots change are denigrated even when those same values are enshrined at higher positions.

I think you're absolutely right. What I find really funny about this, at least in software development, is the "adoption" of the "agile" process they want to strive for which puts the majority of authority into the hands of the people doing the work. In the meetings talking about how wonderful it is, they are all on board, until they realize when they try to put it in place, and suddenly they realize they aren't in control. Then, they blame the process for failing them.

At some point, things need to get done or a company goes out of business.

How is that relevant to the comment you are replying to?

Gervais's Principle gets into this as well.

> In every place I've been, school, university, corporate jobs, the "critical thinkers" always got marginalised.

Because while they get things done, they challenge the status quo.

When I've worked for large companies, the #1, #2, and #3 products of the company were management politics. Actually shipping anything was #4, maybe #5. Critical thinkers looked at that and went "we could do better", and got punished for it.

in a large company, if the main products are management politics, as you say, a capable critical thinker ought to be able to dominate that game, instead of focusing on relatively unimportant priorities like "shipping".

if someone tends to get marginalized, by definition that means they are ineffective at "getting things done".

>in a large company, if the main products are management politics, as you say, a capable critical thinker ought to be able to dominate that game

There's often no point. The main currencies of corporate politics are power, fealty, loyalty, power in numbers and image.

You can use your critical thinking to spin a good story but building coalitions takes time and demonstrating loyalty takes time. In a company on a downward trend is investing that time worth it? Probably not. Is it worth it if your best quality is that you're a reliable kiss ass? Maybe.

If shipping is priority #5 you'd likely do better getting out and moving to a company where it's #1 or #2 where critical thinking skills are more directly rewarded and you don't have to spend 5 years kissing the ring of an idiot boss in order to win political arguments.

> in a large company, if the main products are management politics, as you say, a capable critical thinker ought to be able to dominate that game, instead of focusing on relatively unimportant priorities like "shipping".

Um, they do exactly that? Upper managers are notorious for spending most of their time playing politics and very little time delivering product.

person i was responding to was defining "critical thinkers" as the ones who get sidelined and punished for challenging the status quo and focusing on priorities that are secondary (in fact not even secondary, #4, #5) to the purported main product of large companies, which is political gamesmanship.

so, alleged "critical thinkers" in this context are just the frustrated losers who think they are the one who get things done (which everyone thinks of themselves), but who actually focus on the wrong things to get done, while also rendering themselves ineffective even in that effort.

You're definition of "get things done" is Orwellian in its inanity...

Edit: as per your notion that critical thinkers should apparently just play the game better, rather than...I don't know...think critically/critique it.

Are we even talking the same language?

please read the comments i am responding to. the comment i am responding to is positing that in large companies, the main product is political game-playing (i do not necessarily believe that this is true), stating that delivering and shipping what people typically think of as "product" is #4 and #5 at best (again, i think that is a distorted generalization).

at the same time, the comment i am replying to posits that "critical thinkers" are the effective people in an organization who are really the ones who get things done. at the same time stating that these people who get things done are sidelined, punished and rendered ineffective by the organization. at the same time stating that these same people are the ones who are focused on low-priority items in that organization.

i agree with you, taken together, those statements are rather inane.. not only that but also wildly inconsistent, an ironic example of sloppy critical thinking.

i do not know where you get the impression that critical thinkers "should" play the game better. i am stating the obvious (which apparently isnt), that you would expect truly effective critical thinkers to be very good at focusing on the main priority within an organization, which based on the definitions defined by the previous commentor, is not "shipping product", but rather playing the game better. i disagree with that conclusion, but it is a consistent conclusion that follows assumptions that i also think are flawed.

in fact, assuming the negative assumptions about large organizations are valid, truly effective critical thinkers in such an organization would be able to see thru typical "mission statements" about delivering great product and service yada yada ... and instead focus on the accumulation of individual power and influence, if that is the main purpose of any human group. "the true organization man is the one who is most skeptical [aka critically thinking] about the organization"... or something like that.

anyway, critical thinking and emotionalism (bitterness and resentment about the unfairness of it all) would seem to be mutually opposed.

You're confusing critical thinking with Machiavellianism.

Actually you're confusing a lot of things. Your two penultimate paragraphs directly contradict each other.

critical thinking and Machiavellianism are orthogonal. if you read the comments i am responding to, you'd see that those comments are the ones which are making the assumption that critical thinkers are non-Machiavellian, which is just as inane as the idea that critical thinking should be Machiavellian in nature. perhaps the problem is that for most people it is more emotionally satisfying to believe themselves as non-Machiavellian critical thinkers, thus confusing the two as related somehow.

consider two fundamental properties of critical thinking: asking the right questions, and objectivity. in a large organization that was defined (not by me) as having politics and power-playing as the main priority, then the person who thinks they are "getting things done" as long as those "things" do not involve icky political managerial dynamics ("selling my soul"), never thinking to question their own personal biases of "just because i like to put my head down and work on shipping product, is that the right thing to get done?", would seem to in fact not be engaging in critical thinking at all.

again, my reply is responding to (not supporting) the nonsensical proposition that critical thinkers (as ill-defined by other commentors) are more effective than Machiavellian actors, even as they are supposedly marginalized (aka rendered ineffective) within large organizations.

i can understand why that line of thinking is confusing, because it is.

No, it's not confusing, it's just wrong. You're confusing objectivity, which is understanding how a situation really works, with a moral imperative to take advantage of every situation.

You're also implying that Machivellianism works better for individuals and corporations.

There's absolutely no evidence to support that position, and plenty of evidence to refute it - not least the incredibly stupid and destructive decisions made by corporate "winners" for reasons of political advantage which regularly sink companies and damage their own employment prospects.

If you were truly engaging in critical thinking you'd be able to understand this. In fact all you're doing is projecting the inverse of your own emotional biases onto people who not only have different motivations, but are modelling outcomes as a whole more effectively than you are.

The key question is the size of your predictive horizon. Just because someone is effective at small-scale politics doesn't mean they understand likely outcomes from a broader perspective.

In your system "critical thinkers" would be just as effective in absolutely any political system, including bureaucracy for its own sake, and North Korean dictatorship.

Clearly both of those have fundamental inefficiencies and stupidities which severely limit their practical effectiveness. Playing the game may be expedient if you're trapped inside them, but the inefficiencies and stupidities can only ever be mitigated by individuals who understand what's wrong with them, not by those who conform to them for personal gain.

> There's absolutely no evidence to support that position, and plenty of evidence to refute it - not least the incredibly stupid and destructive decisions made by corporate "winners" for reasons of political advantage which regularly sink companies and damage their own employment prospects.

In engineering terms, optimizing for local maxima doesn't mean you get the global maxima.

i.e. managers playing political games over crap "win" in the short term. And sink companies in the long term.

I know people who worked at DEC. They said it was a great company when it was focussed on products, and on engineering. Then at some point, "professional managers" took over. Management then became focussed on politics and infighting. And... DEC died.

> If you were truly engaging in critical thinking you'd be able to understand this. In fact all you're doing is projecting the inverse of your own emotional biases onto people who not only have different motivations, but are modelling outcomes as a whole more effectively than you are.

That sounds right to me.

The immediate labeling of people as "frustrated losers" shows that his reaction is emotional, and not rational.

> You're also implying that Machivellianism works better for individuals and corporations.

my position is exactly the opposite of stating that Machivellianism "works better". in fact the comments i have been responding to, and disagreeing with, were making that case, not me.

(in any case, the opposite of "works better" does not mean "works worse")

those comments assumed the following (il)logical connections: a) critical thinking = non-Machiavellian behavior, b) critical thinkers are supposedly the most effective in "getting things done", c) yet, critical thinkers are supposedly the most likely to be punished and rendered ineffective, d) Machiavellianism is rewarded (aka "works better") in big companies, e) because critical thinkers focus on priorities that are relatively unimportant in large companies, such as "shipping product"

not only are some of these points individually suspect, but taken together they are inconsistent and make no sense at all.

> i think that is a distorted generalization

It's a generalization, but it's based on my experiences. It's not wholly wrong.

> the comment i am replying to posits that "critical thinkers" are the effective people in an organization who are really the ones who get things done.

Critical thinkers are usually the people who want to get things done. They might be effective, if the organization lets them be effective. Or, they might be entirely ineffective if the organization is pathological.

> at the same time stating that these people who get things done are sidelined, punished and rendered ineffective by the organization.

You're reading a lot into a simple comment.

> at the same time stating that these same people are the ones who are focused on low-priority items in that organization.

You've read too much into my comments.

In a pathological organization, the high priority items are management politics. Those politics are the daily work product of the majority of managers. The way a manager gets recognized or promoted is via playing the political game. actually shipping something is a lower priority.

> i agree with you, taken together, those statements are rather inane.. not only that but also wildly inconsistent, an ironic example of sloppy critical thinking.

Well, no. You didn't understand my comments. So you constructed a straw man version and attacked that. Genius!

> i am stating the obvious (which apparently isnt), that you would expect truly effective critical thinkers to be very good at focusing on the main priority within an organization

Only if you believe that critical thinkers enjoy playing the political games, and that they're good at it. My experience is that the people most focussed on political games are utter shit at engineering, and shipping product.

> anyway, critical thinking and emotionalism (bitterness and resentment about the unfairness of it all) would seem to be mutually opposed.

You can engage in critical thinking, while at the same time being upset that people treat you like shit for engaging in critical thinking. The two are in no way mutually exclusive.

Or, someone who enjoys getting things done can move to another company, where the management goals are aligned with the corporate goals.

Sometimes I don't want to sell my soul.

Sure, but that's sad. Q: Why not get everybody involved with #1-#5? A: Because that's more effort for management, and they'd have to trust their staff. (Sometimes it depends on how well you go about this, aka. soft skills, but often there's no way to sell it other than get involved with company politics for 2+ years)

I'd also argue that at large companies, getting stuff shipped isn't usually the hardest part, not stagnating is. "How could we do things better" can be a pretty huge and valuable question in large places.

i think command and control management structures have a lot of benefits at scale. Maybe at scale a company's competitive edge is essentially about executing on information, and information asymmetry, which is why things like trust and politics are more important than shipping efficiently. Just an idea.

Not sure I'm following. Can you elaborate?

Don't confuse critical thinking with disruptive behavior. I often think the current approach is dumb, but I also accept I don't know everything. So, I generally just toss an idea out there, give it 15-30 seconds of support and move on.

People that dig in even if they are correct and I agree with them are much harder to work with. Further, doing something even if it's a poor solution is often better than continuing to look for the right solution.

Disruptive behaviour in school is often caused by boredom. In a professional setting, I guess it could also be for ego/political reasons.

But if somebody is thinking along and asks genuinely good questions, it isn't usually for ego reasons - they want to learn. I think it's worth pursuing: either a) you find somebody knows why it was done a certain way, and it's good to spread that knowledge (and get to know other people in the org) or b) everybody has left/forgotten why it was done that way, and it's good to increase/regain that knowledge.

By the way, acceptable answers for doing it a certain way include "politics", "time pressure", and "we didn't know any better". These are way better than "don't know", because they're valuable knowledge. "Don't know" can also easily translate to "we don't understand the risks, so there's no way you're going to be allowed to change this".

"don't know and we'll never know/don't care" is the easiest way out. My advice to anybody who keeps hearing this is start looking for your next job - this place will never care about personal development and helping you grow.

Disruptive behaviour is caused by frustration, and frustration in school is often caused by boredom (it's not like there are many other sources compared to the workplace).

The problem with workplace politics is that there are usually two kinds of critical thinking: thinking that boils down to "we are doing OK, but we could do better if we did X" which is the type of critical thinking everyone loves, and then there's "we are doing something obviously wrong and we need to stop", which is literally critical thinking and is invariably risky (it's criticising people, often management).

Organisations always say they want independent and critical thinkers, but they hardly ever do. They want yes men who will cheerlead for the side. That's tough on people who genuinely care about an organisation or want to see it succeed because strange or dysfunctional behaviour (ignoring customer feedback for example) can easily occur in almost any workplace, and sometimes there's no positive or upbeat way to say "we should probably listen to our customers" or "maybe that process you just put in place is a waste of time", or whatever the problem of the day is.

Keep in mind that one thing every manager/owner hears day in, day out, all the time, is advice on how he's doing everything wrong and here's how to do it better. It isn't surprising that this eventually gets tuned out until there's good associated evidence that this particular person should be listened to.

Every one of us is sure we know how to do our manager's job better than he does. There are threads every day on HN (including this one) on this. Is it any surprise that managers tend to tune it out after a while?

There's feedback and then there's feedback.

If a manager makes a decision having weighed the factors, and some team members disagree, but it's an arguable thing (corporate strategy for instance) and the difference is mostly one of opinion, sure, I agree. Constant criticism of that will get tuned out.

There's also cases where something is just clearly dysfunctional. For instance, if the CEO is constantly talking about how the firm needs to move fast and innovate, but installing a new piece of software on your workstation takes six months and involves three forms, it's fair to say that isn't a difference of opinion (all parties want to move faster and innovate more), that's a failure of execution. Someone, somewhere, clearly feels that this bureaucracy is worth it, but they probably can't defend that given the firm's priorities.

You can phrase that as "this process is great, but we could make it even better" if you want to be as well-loved as possible. My experience has been that this usually leads to an answer of the form "thanks, we're glad you love our service, unfortunately we have many other things we're doing right now kthxbye" - i.e. when nothing is bad and everything is merely a proposed improvement, improvements that might be even slightly threatening to anyone just get ignored entirely. And you can't complain because everything is peachy, right?

> Keep in mind that one thing every manager/owner hears day in, day out, all the time, is advice on how he's doing everything wrong and here's how to do it better. It isn't surprising that this eventually gets tuned out until there's good associated evidence that this particular person should be listened to.

Super good point, thanks for that.

When I was younger I played the game of fitting in. I remember one time at a company this guy wanted to improve our process (process improvement and Lean was a big buzzword at the company at the time) by introducing automated testing to augment our completely manual and inefficient way we were doing testing. He fought the good fight but was eventually labeled a black sheep and got "managed out". I learned a lot about what companies say they want and what they actually want from that experience.

The second type is generally better dealt with indirectly so it becomes the first type. Daily stand up taking 1 hour every day. If you say it's a waste of time let's cancel it then people look bad. If you say, we are wasting time let's get faster then management is rarely going to complain.

Do we really need 30 people in this meeting? What if we had someone send out the meeting notes? etc.

Granted, this assumes people want to get actual work done.

I dislike that passive-aggressive dynamic of converting the second type of thinking/feedback to the first. And that dynamic generally has a name: "politics". I've been on teams where I had to use rhetoric to convince a (non-technical) manager that following standard design practices like low coupling/high cohesion, etc. results in more robust software.

What's sad about that whole political dynamic is that it wears people down to the point they just don't care anymore. They're tired of people (often management) who can't make a decision due to political pressures ("I don't want to be the manager who has any project 'fail.'"). This often leads to decision makers succumbing to the sunk cost fallacy. But as long as there are status reports and it looks like work is getting done, then the process continues.

I don't really like politics, but 10,000 years ago people in mud brick huts where taking politics and today people in mud brick huts are still talking politics. If nothing else politics works and ignoring things that work just make your life harder. Also of note, mud brick huts have been around for a really long time.

I understand completely. You have to find the place whose politics interest you as much as the work. That's very difficult (pretty much impossible) to gauge during an interview. You really need someone on the inside to give a complete view.

The other problem with that is it makes it hard to put in place a systematic improvement process. A formal failure analysis process is a wonderful thing that can rapidly drive improvement, but to have such a thing you must first be able to say "that was a failure, let's analyse it". In a highly PC environment where nobody ever fails at anything, everything is always wonderful and the only possible change is to become even greater, it's hard to be fully honest with yourselves.

Here's an example from my own career: I once worked at software firm which routinely sent customer feedback to a black hole. Literally, there were forums where customers could talk to each other, and feedback forms on the website, yet either nobody read them at all or there was someone in customer support who theoretically read them but actually didn't.

I discovered that when I tried to use one of the company's own web forms to report a technical issue with one of their products. When nothing happened, I started asking around. The email thread I started (which was plenty polite: just asking who owned this form and whether my feedback was being processed) quickly got like 20 people CCd onto it as everyone tried to pass the buck and eventually it became clear that whilst it had perhaps once been connected to something, the form had at some point stopped being monitored and nobody had noticed, in fact, the feedbacks weren't even being stored anywhere. We were literally throwing customer feedback in the bin.

Eventually, after asking the question of who was actually responsible for this process and who was going to fix it maybe four or five times (lots of people appeared to be involved in nebulous ways and nobody was willing to take responsibility), I pointed out that this seemed like a fairly serious failure and perhaps there should be a post-mortem of some kind, which was a routine occurrence in other parts of the firm.

This suggestion went down like a lead balloon, as you may imagine. I don't recall if the issue was ever fixed: at some point I ran out of energy and stopped caring. This is how engineers get a reputation as being awkward and difficult: they exist in a world where things work or they don't, and there's no shame in writing a bug because we all do it, but when your software is buggy you're expected to admit that and fix it. Lots of people in fluffier job descriptions don't exist in such a world and interpret any hint that they might have actually ... failed ... as hostile and threatening.

I've found the best tactic, being an underling, is to perform the critical thinking for management and continuously improve your area of work.

As a funny and relevant anecdote, I used to process returns for an e-tailer and we had a particular type of refurb product that had a different part numbers on the box, in the firmware, and on the back tag. One day when I had the shop running full bore, I stopped for a few hours while the boss was out, grabbed a piece of paper, then spent some time in a thought experiment reverse-engineering the manufacturers supply chain to find out why. I discovered they had specs for these devices for a particular market, models a through z, and wanted to refurb to those specs to maximize profits. We got the cobbled together unique items that met no spec. I went to the manufacturers website, pulled up a list of PN's by model series, and plug and chugged until I got a valid warranty on every unit with 3 different PN's.

We also had a lot of mis-shipped, mis-picked, mis-recieved, and mis-advertised product. I asked the guy building the SKU's and Ad's for a spec sheet and then grabbed a factory service manual, and by my logs, discovered the issue was they didn't have the right ports on the side listed. The guy doing the SKU's made a change in how he advertised product, the throughput of devices coming through my shop dropped 80% within 3 weeks. I then had time to do things like assemble reciepts for a dozen AV Head units, find and send skids of them to an ASP, get them repaired and sent back, and restocked. Then we discovered we had someone stealing product. All of those fixes resulted in about $400k a year in savings for a $20 million a year company.

How did the CFO Find out about all this? We were selling to a liquidator anything I couldn't fix. They gave us 55c on the dollar of book value when I started, then 35c, then 25c, then 15c, then 5c. Finally nobody would take the garbage I was producing; literally if I had one liquid damaged item I'd use the parts to repair anything and everything else I could and I even did crazy things like using lego's to replace screwable-pegs inside of TV's using 2-part epoxy. So one day about a year after I started the CFO wanders down to the warehouse to see what's going on, and finds 15 skids of absolute garbage.

He then turns to my boss, the warehouse operations manager\account manager, and begins yelling "WHAT THE !@!@# ARE YOU DOING? WHY HASN'T THIS BEEN SOLD? WHAT HAPPENED TO THE LIQUIDATOR!" and on and on and on. Apparently, nobody in corporate had performed any quantitative analysis. I had with a 200 meg excel 2003 document that would tell me what was coming in and how much it was.

I was saving him $400k a year. The cheapskate gave me a buck an hour raise for the effort, what a crok. They kept me around as the company shrunk from 200 employee's to 20 and went through bankruptcy. On the other end they were going to use my refurb shop since that was the only profitable side of the org entertainingly enough. I eventually left the place entirely.

The problem in America is that there's a boat-load of executive managers who have no critical thinking skills themselves, so their employee's see that fact, and see decisions are made subjectively or arbitrarily, and they are demotivated or as I call it, they catch "IDon'tGiveAShazbotItus". Lots of people catch the terminal version of that disease; doesn't matter where they go, they will never give a shazbot because they've been lied to so many times. You just cannot work with someone who has no critical thinking skills. There's no striving for continuous improvement and no rewards for it either. My entire career has been about doing bad things to computer and even worse things to executives; I have lost count of the number of people I've gotten fired, including executives.

After-all, if some schmuck with 1 IT certification in a warehouse can save you $400k a year at a 20 million a year company, and the CFO doesn't notice where it's coming from. That's either incompetence or abuse.

I agree with you, but it often leads to people with a clue getting repeatedly ignored by those without a clue. Which then leads to people feeling ignored/undervalued, particularly after the things they're ignored about go awry.

This is what I deal with at my current position. There's a lead engineer who is working in a domain he has no knowledge of. The system being built, while having a somewhat sound, if not outdated, conceptual foundation, has not produced gainful/tangible results for almost three years. I told my manager that I strongly believed the system would never work, or be usable in production even if it "looked like" it worked. My input was ignored despite my demonstrated knowledge of the domain.

We had that conversation a year ago, and the system still doesn't do anything useful. The team morale is pretty low. Three levels of management are updated weekly on this project, but none of them seem to think anything is wrong. Because I don't have "lead" in front of my title, it seems my input isn't worth anything.

Anyway, it was nice to vent.

Also, I'm looking for another job. Any companies out there want a critical thinker who isn't afraid to deliver honest feedback? :)

Don't mistake being a contrarian with being a critical thinker.

That was the point I was trying to make when I said "not abrasive and argumentative, just different". Maybe I should have said different perspective.

Incidentally, I find working with people with different perspectives hugely helpful when problem solving, although you can see how vastly different perspectives can also cause problems in understanding. I suspect there's a sweet spot, depending on your role/company/environment.

Ironically you just mistook a contrarian with a critical thinker.

Oops. Maybe I don't understand "contrarian" as well as I should.

Wikipedia says "A contrarian is a person who takes up a contrary position, especially a position that is opposed to that of the majority, regardless of how unpopular it may be", which to me reads like a reactionary thing. People with different views, that's just how they think. They don't do it for kicks to antagonize people. Right?

The way I think of 'contrarian' is someone who takes an opposing position strictly because it is in opposition to others, and not due to sincerely help beliefs or the actual merits of the position.

But I think I should apologize to you and the parent post. I just saw an opportunity to come off as being a little clever. I have no idea if the parent poster was actually trying to be contrarian or not. And while I'm just trying to boost my ego, here you are still actually trying to have a meaningful conversation and to understand where others are coming from. Good on you, that's truly admirable. I wish I did the same more often.

Thank you for reminding me why I read HN comment sections. I appreciate this sort of earnest, well-intentioned dialogue. It is unfortunately not so prevalent on the wider web.

I have a different understanding, it's not resistance for resistance sake, it's the willingness to dissent when you disagree. The first thing that pop to my mind is a book by Christopher Hitchens called "Letters to a Young Contrarian". While he enjoyed arguments he did not argue for argument sake for a position he did not hold.

Ironically, you just mistook a critical thinker with someone who agrees with you.

People prefer critical thinkers when they help them in their grand vision. Unfortunately, a critical thinker may have some things he wants too.

Totally agree, and I would add that critical thinking leads quickly to positions that are not generally accepted.

We need contrairian people as a balance to people who think they are infallible. Both should be a small percentage of society with the remaining majority willing to change if needed.

Being a contrarian is no more valuable than being a yes man.

Neither has any societal value.

I can't disagree more with this statement. Echo chambers are dangerous. Just because everyone in the room agrees doesn't make it a good idea.

The kinder term for contrarian is devil's advocate. If no one else will, you need someone to present an opposing viewpoint.

The WSJ isn't encouraging critical thinking here - it's making self-described "critical thinkers" feel like they're important and valuable people, thus convincing them to read the WSJ.

I found that this collection of Chomsky snippets expands on this quite well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPp69gKVe9o

Good ol' Chomsky :)

I made a similar observation, critical thinking seems to be something undesired and it easily gets suppressed. However I truly believe it can work but it needs some sort of personal communication strategy. For example timing is critical. An obvious example is when shit hits the fan and coming up with reasons what could have been done better in the past. It's better to postpone that when things are fixed.

But when working with people that generally dislike critical input, one needs to combine this with other things. Like saying such criticism only 1:1 (never in meetings), staying cool and thinking out things before saying them. Sometimes it's better to not answer certain people instead of giving a half baked answer that can be used for attack ground.

Yeah, life isn't easy but there are ways.

Yes - but that is how corporations are organized.

As an employee, your primary goal should be to make your boss happy: and any changes or initiative will hurt your career. If you are young you might make mistake, but people are not stupid they learn from their mistakes.

So you have to go the point where your "boss" are customers / users of your product. Then critical thinkings works well.

> In every place I've been, school, university, corporate jobs, the "critical thinkers" always got marginalised.

In my experience, there is a specific experience threshold at which critical thinking switches from being an annoying trait of a young and garrulous employee to the most valuable asset a more senior person could have.