Comment by jodrellblank

I wouldn't reply in that way in a workplace, they're exaggerated to illustrate the trolling nature of the questions. Picking arbitrary things and demanding that someone explain them to you is what narcissistic parents and horrible film drill sergeants do - what they are doing is power-tripping and keeping you uncomfortable.

It looks polite because they aren't using swear words, but you can tell there's something up when the original commenters wants to go and give this advice "in private" "for your own good". That's not right. Private is for "your work is all over the place and you are distracted, is there anything I can help with?". It's not for "SSHD handles login failures much more sanely than BLUB". There's nothing about that which needs to be critical or secretive.

Giving well-meaning advice would be something like "Many times when I brought in new tools turned to regret when other people had to deal with them during outages, and when I see BLUB used instead of SSHD it makes me nervous. All N people will have to take time to learn it to integrate it properly with the team, so I strongly recommend unexciting and familiar tools by default; but individual situations are unique and I don't know BLUB well - what is its strength, and does it add enough that we might consider moving everything to it?"

That is - advise what to do ("use unexciting tools"), explain why (backstory with consequences of not following advice in the past), explain who it affects (coworkers in stressful times), share less-obvious concerns (cost of everyone having to learn it), and be open to new information (maybe their plan can add a lot of value).

> and we'd never let a novice with that attitude get far enough to affect things.

A child would never have the power to talk back to power-tripping adult, but an equal adult would. "I want to stop you and interrogate you about some random thing I've noticed without explaining why I want to do that", "Well you can't, I'm busy. Stop power playing and trying to imply you know things and making me beg for them; if you have advice which improves the product, give that advice to everyone."