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Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

> The idea was supposedly that everyones ideas were valid and hierarchy didn't matter and that everyone should challenge anything no matter who they were in the organisation.

On the engineering side, ideally this is how things are done anyway.

I've never had a problem digging into the ideas presented by engineers more senior than me, and I've always encouraged junior engineers to question any ideas I present.

Everyone, independent of seniority, is blind to giant gaping flaws in their own ideas. People also don't know what they don't know. If I have a gap in my knowledge, any plans I come up with are not going to take what I don't know into consideration if I don't know that I don't know something.

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Just because you are in engineering does not mean politics, culture, psychology stop applying. It's really no different than any job at all. Engineers will often think they're in some kind of meritocracy, when in reality they're just as trapped by social constructions as anyone else.

This.

I've never worked at a place that could reasonably be broad-brushed as a meritocracy. Every company employs humans, and humans bring their humanness to their jobs.

Some places are closer to a real meritocracy than others, but ones that think they are tend to be further from it than ones that don't.

Not a meritocracy, no, but when you're dealing with an instrumented system you're better able to prove whether an idea is good or bad. Compared to e.g. a teacher, an engineer can prove the impact of a piece of work much faster. Engineers in practical fields also have the advantage of decades of safety culture and strong institutions that will protect them if they report a problem that will literally kill people.

I agree that an engineer is still trapped by social concerns, but not that they're as trapped as anyone else, because anyone who can easily demonstrate that they're right, even if they aren't listened to and even if they can only demonstrate it in some specific areas, has an advantage over someone who can't.

Furthermore: the MORE they ignore that reality, the more trapped they are.

Most good places I've worked are like this naturally. Good ideas can come from anywhere, it just needs respect.

What put me off about this company was how they sold this as the central idea of their company. It made me wonder what made them think this needed to be pushed so strongly. I tend to be suspicious of overriding ideologies.

There's two abuses in this system you have to watch out for:

- being presented under-cooked ideas so you do the thinking for them.

- too many ideas (which can lead to the first) with an inability to focus

There is a feedback loop for the first where people don't dive too deeply into their idea because they know they'll get a lot of criticism.

The second can be bad because the idea or its implementation is never polished.

It's hard to get right, and merely having a culture of openness is not sufficient - it is easy to abuse - intentionally or otherwise. A common theme I see is "X criticizes/scrutinizes Y more often than he does Z because of some bias X has against Y" (could be an implicit bias). Most teams I've been in are incapable of handling such behavior (i.e. recognizing that X is the problem and not Y).

> Most teams I've been in are incapable of handling such behavior (i.e. recognizing that X is the problem and not Y).

This is true. On the best team I was ever on, the team leader was respected by everyone and he also mediated conflicts. At the same time, he was incredibly open to new ideas and points of view, and would gladly spent days thinking about what people said to him before coming to a conclusion.

On multiple occasions I made proposals that were in direct conflict with what he had proposed, and he took the time to think my ideas over and give thoughtful feedback, and also on many occasions we came to either compromise, or he changed his mind based on the technical evidence presented.

I guess what I'm saying is, if you have someone in the team that everyone looks up to, and who everyone respects both technically and personally, then that one single person can define the culture for the team.

Conflict will happen if it's a truly honest system. If there's no conflict, people are not telling the truth about things that cause conflict. Does it happen, and how does the system handle it?

When someone has made an honest mistake, exposing that is not a source of conflict. The conflict only arises when the "mistake" wasn't honest, but rather the person was being dishonest about their goals from the start.

Again, that's an ideal, and I promote that ideal and do my best to practice it. But if there is no conflict, there is certainly dishonesty. A social system that pretends there is none is a lie, and everyone knows it (but apparently can't say so). A social system that pretends there is no conflict is like a software development system that pretends there are no bugs.

> if there is no conflict, there is certainly dishonesty

Do you consider honest disagreement (whether about facts or about priorities) to be "conflict"? That is something that always happens, but secret nonalignment doesn't always have to happen.

I mean anger, people feeling threatened/unsafe, etc. It doesn't always happen, it can be reduced, but you're kidding yourself if it isn't happening. Again, like getting zero bug reports for your software - something is wrong.

Will it happen? Sure. Can you reduce it to the level where it doesn't significantly deter people from being honest about issues? IME yes, though perhaps not in every kind of organisation.

Yes, agreed, though I don't think the solution is only reducing frequency, but managing it effectively when it does happen.

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