It is an infuriating challenge to deal with, especially when you're faced withacompletely passivebusiness interface only committed to answering exactly the question you ask, not taking the question and doing the bit of contextual fill-in and translation one would expect. As a result, to cope with that, you have to ask heavily qualified, context bearing questions to Get to the bottom of anything; which after a certain point becomes unintelligible if you don't have someone actively willing to follow along, which manydon'tsee the value of, because they don't see it as doing anything of value.
It's a vicious cycle really.
I had a real heart-to-heart with the CTO where I worked since he only gets along with one of the managers and doesn't like his directors. He said the only reason he approved my promotion was because he was tired of hearing Yes Men telling him things were fine right until they blew up in his face. He's a tech guy, not a business guy so probably outside the norm.
That's the first step. Proposing a complete solution that takes in the needs of the various stakeholders and doesn't just move the problem and does so in a way that makes the whole situation easier is the hard part.
If you've done that and nobody is listening, it's time to change the culture or leave.
There's a fine line between being thorough, and doing the job of several other people for them. The latter isn't what you're being paid for, and in some companies isn't appreciated if it risks some of them losing face.
The systems engineer (who was a friend, but maybe not the smartest tool in the shed) spec'd a system, and (high level verilog) simulated the system, and gave the output to the circuit guys (led by (also a friend) one of the most talented mixed-signal circuit designers I know - but abrasive as hell), said: "It won't work. Too much power draw on on modules off the bus. And besided is you power them through the bus, you're going to get a lot of noise and chop and brown-outs".
The manager - who was not an idiot - but to your point (1) above, was NOT aware of the issue and didn't want to believe it was issue and was NOT keenly aware of the issue (he was in denial), so they ran the wafers.
Chips come back - they don't work. Power draw issues.
My circuit designer friend (remember the abrasive part?) - gloated and mocked them for being idiots that did not know how to listen. (He was right - but he didn't have many friends in management).
They said: "OK. Make the changes. We'll do another run.". He said: Give me a couple of die. He went back to the lab - laser snipped a couple of traces - and voila! It now worked! (He had designed in a way to solve the problem as if they had originally decided to do it his way)
He cut 3 months off the schedule - saved millions of dollars - but were mad as hell. I think they wanted to fire him.
I learned a couple of things from all of that:
- Sometimes smart people don't know about problems because they don't want to know
- Pride is a horrible sin - I would have been grateful to have my bacon saved - they were not
- Nobody ever gets a bonus or promotion for putting out a fire that never actually gets started.
EDIT: Formatting. It's stil not great.
- Being excellent becomes a baseline expectation if you do it long enough so it's best you never put out your best possible work in the office?
Pretty interesting story, thank you for it! Seriously though, my main takeaway is that you can be a genius and not an ass -- at the same time. But in your particular example the guy was completely in his right to mock them.
And sadly yes, pride overrides a lot of other, supposedly much more important, factors. Learned that over my career as well and it's not one of the lessons that I enjoyed receiving.
People from cultures where sarcasm isn't common don't understand this nuance and seem to find this kind of dialogue abrasive and unconstructive. Perhaps the sentiment is that if you can't articulate it clearly, then the issue is non-existent, for better or worse, or you're just being lazy and unhelpful.
What also helps, counter intuitively, is providing multiple sarcastic statements in quick succession. People listen to spoken words at set rate but the nonverbal parts of communication are instantly clear. This allows the listener the opportunity to consider the extended thought in a single context allowing for a richer sample of sarcastic communication to think over.
Sarcasm + empathy for those around you dealing with the problem = powerful form of communication.
Sarcasm + being an asshole = being an asshole.
(Note: This is from my Australian background/culture/point-of-view, and I don't for a moment think it applies cross culturally - we are the culture where calling someone a cunt can be either a sign of deep profound friendship, or a reason to be punched in the face. When in the US, I need to be careful with that sort of instinctive interaction/language...)
You can be cynical and sarcastic without being personally abusive or a sexist troglodyte.
The "militant counter culture" you speak of definitely does exist. But codes of conduct didn't start appearing out of thin air, they exist because they need to exist. Anyone who doesn't recognise that is almost certainly coming from a place of oblivious privilege. (Hell, I admit to being obliviously privileged a lot of the time, and _I_ can see the very real need for codes of conduct to exist so that assholes and troglodytes can't continue saying "It's a joke, calm down", or "I'm just being blunt, you can't handle the truth" or all the other gaslighting bullshit they so often get away with...)
They exist because projects have been bullied into doing that. On top of that the conditions were pushed in. Do you really need to have a thing to say "don't deadname"?
Expectations of conduct have, and continued to, existe(d) before that and they were enforced. The only thing this does is to try to give people who don't like how a group is run room to bully the people running it.
Last weekend Elon Musk put a couple of people in space at a fraction of the costs NASA originally spent.
I think and hope many industries can still be disrupted in a similar way.
You seem to be comparing the cost of doing something the first time with doing it 40 years of technology later
Perhaps it’s wording and I’m sure private companies are more cost effective compared to government
The US collective mentality is sometime overly optimistic specially in public. This is sometimes a positive since it removes almost any inhibition regarding challenges, but it can lead to things blowing-up spectacularly, and then having to put in place hacks and brute force to make it kind of work relatively inefficiently and inelegantly.
But it also leads to great successes (biggest economy in the world, lots of major companies, very attractive country for talents) and innovations never seen before.
This positivism is prevalent in public statement but in private cracks start to appear. It gives me the impression that this positivism is pretty much a cultural obligation, so while not authoritarian, the group mentality is geared toward not talking to much about possible difficulties out of fear of being seen as too negative by the group.