That's why they said "if you're comfortable". It was totally optional. I don't understand your strong reaction to this.

Because you cannot freely say no to that. They have authority over you. Even if they promise it won't affect their opinion of you, you never know if that is actually true. So you are forced to play along.

"Are you planning to have children? You don't have to answer"

Asking a question in front of a group, bur adding a "if you're comfortable", doesn't really make the problem go away. There's always a pressure to answer, even if you say that answering is optional. It's not a horrible violation but it's still kind of weird and unnecessary in a professional context.

I promise you I mean this sincerely, and not in a memey internet insult kind of way - are you perhaps autistic?

I ask because this is exactly the type of comment one of my siblings would make, and she is on the spectrum. She wouldn't be able to understand the social dynamics at play here, whereas for other folks it's just common sense. "Optional" is not really optional in some social settings, and that's something autistic folks struggle with being aware of, much less understanding. The activity may be optional in the most pedantic sense; you won't be struck down by lightning if you decide not to participate. But there will be consequences.

All of which is another reason why this whole exercise is an awful idea, considering that the number of autistic folks in software engineering is probably a bit higher than the population baseline.

Kind of hilarious to make this suggestion while simultaneously revealing yourself to not understand nuance or commonsense.

Please, elaborate. What nuance and commonsense do you feel I'm not understanding?

After reading all the comments, I'm starting to wonder.

You are not your code, but putting my code up to be torn apart in a PR definitely feels like being vulnerable to me. It's a good thing for it to be torn apart and scrutinized, so as to make the product better, which is what we're all after, but it still touches a nerve when the reviewer is an ass about it.

This is definitely not what anyone would think of when prompted to "be vulnerable".

Yup. Absolutely zero percent chance a Jr dev's expressed vulnerability that day was "when I see sr dev is sitting at his desk muttering "stupid fucking idiots" and reviewing PRs, I get scared and anxious".

Making high performance teams is part of their job description though, and there is research to indicate that teams with strong social bonds perform better.

Yeah but you don't form strong social bonds through awkward team exercises. The best team I worked on was super high performing and we did end up sharing personal stuff on our spare time eventually (and some of us are still friends years later). That all happened organically.

What didn't work, however, was the office manager's increasingly awkward attempts to force socialising. When at some point we raised the issue (politely!) that this was often distracting, he became offended and lashed out. We later also found out that he was basically spying on us and reporting back to HQ.

It's one of the reasons why I'm incredibly wary of people who try too hard to be my "buddy" at work, especially if they're not peers.

Correlations tend to disappear when one of the correlated things starts to get used as a tunable.

Related: [Goodhart's Law](https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority...)

Those teams develop strong social bonds precisely because their manager doesn't request (force) them to be 10% more vulnerable. That's a 1-way ticket to a bunch of people not liking you.

You can achieve that vulnerability via being a likable and honest person. I think often us technical-minded people forget that relationships aren't an optimization problem and don't respond like you think they would. Just being decent and trustworthy will take you there, saying things like "you can trust me guys!" often has the opposite effect.