I am surprised that most of the comments here are actually advocating for navigating Dilbert-style office politics as an effective way of "getting along."
There is clearly too much conformism and flawed communication flow in this organization, which is a failure of leadership, and not of somebody who is "actually doing what [he] was paid to do."
The team "criticisms" are to the person who is actually doing his job, instead of the ideas this person expresses, falling at the very bottom of "Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement."
If there is too much conformism, necessary conflict will be avoided and could not be utilized in a healthy way, leading to too much consensus resulting in "one-year old pull requests without review."
In such situation, leadership should have had created a secure context for the team to consider their gaps in process that produce results with reduced quality.
If a competent but "less socially aware" guy moves "too fast," why the team prefers to effectively mob this guy out of the organization, instead of just telling him to slow down?
No such context for constructive feedback, maybe?
This organization is just shooting itself from the foot.
Organizations that need to move fast cannot afford such conformism and dysfunctional communication.
This is just humans being humans. Some people have more capacity for openness and receiving criticism than others.
Wisdom comes from taking time and understanding why organizations fail as they often do, and not trying to just fight your way through all the time.
It won't work, and people will not suddenly stop being as they are to fulfill your desire for a place where people will immediately drop what they're doing to listen to what the new person has to say.
That's not to say that they shouldn't, and smarter orgs will retain flexibility and welcome new ideas. But if you just expect that or feel entitled to it, you're gonna have a bad time.
It's not Dilbert-style because there's no conclusive evidence of incompetence. When you are new, you should be giving people the benefit of the doubt, and tread lightly. Raise these concerns privately and gauge the situation. After a few months it will become apparent if the place is truly dysfunctional, in which case you would need to have left on your own.
> I am surprised that most of the comments here are actually advocating for navigating Dilbert-style office politics as an effective way of "getting along."
That's unfair. Most people who are advocating for deference when first joining a team.
And the common justification isn't politics! The most common justification is that there are a lot of "unknown unknowns". Therefore, sitting back and learning the social and technical history that led to the current system is actually the correct place to be in the exploration-exploitation axis during the probationary period.
Both for social reasons, as well as for technical reasons.
That's very different from "put up with office politics". The point is not that you should be likable during the probationary period. The point is that people who go way the hell too far to the "exploitation" side of the axis so quickly are demonstrating poor engineering judgment.
Characterizing that poor judgment as "well I guess I'm just not PC enough" is just icing on the cake.
> The team "criticisms" are to the person who is actually doing his job, instead of the ideas this person expresses, falling at the very bottom of "Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement."
According to this account.
I submit that it's not even obvious that the engineer in this story was even making the correct engineering decision. Engineers are not scientists:
> In such situation, leadership should have had created a secure context for the team to consider their gaps in process that produce results with reduced quality.
I think the core problem in this story was wasting a bunch of the company's time arguing over a heuristic that's "good enough" in practice. Both solutions would have been "good enough"; the engineer put his ego above producing value for the company.
> Organizations that need to move fast cannot afford such conformism and dysfunctional communication.
Organizations that need to move fast cannot afford engineers spending time to prove they were correct when going with the established heuristic would've produced a good enough result with far less engineering time involved.
If the story included a thorough cost/benefit analysis showing that the change saved the company $N0,000 with N > (cost of engineering time) then you might have a more cogent argument.
> And the common justification isn't politics! The most common justification is that there are a lot of "unknown unknowns".
They're mostly not unkown unknowns. They're mostly arcane knowledge of some sort or the other.
And what prevents good communication of this knowledge besides either lack of competence or politics?
Someone didn't know or didn't care to do better and nobody held them accountantable for it.
In particular, the strange horrible code might be there for a great reason. But there is not a good reason for nobody to take five minutes to write a comment about why. And there is no reason to not ask for that comment when the change is reviewed.
There is clearly too much conformism and flawed communication flow in this organization, which is a failure of leadership, and not of somebody who is "actually doing what [he] was paid to do."
The team "criticisms" are to the person who is actually doing his job, instead of the ideas this person expresses, falling at the very bottom of "Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement."
If there is too much conformism, necessary conflict will be avoided and could not be utilized in a healthy way, leading to too much consensus resulting in "one-year old pull requests without review."
In such situation, leadership should have had created a secure context for the team to consider their gaps in process that produce results with reduced quality.
If a competent but "less socially aware" guy moves "too fast," why the team prefers to effectively mob this guy out of the organization, instead of just telling him to slow down?
No such context for constructive feedback, maybe?
This organization is just shooting itself from the foot.
Organizations that need to move fast cannot afford such conformism and dysfunctional communication.