Comment by godelski

I disagree, a bit. There should always be some contention between manager and developer. It's healthy. But I think many developers just remain silent and are afraid to speak up. They are afraid of losing their jobs, or worse, getting kicked out of the country. It's reasonable, but it is one of many factors that contribute to the negative feedback loop of myopic management.

We've all seen developers who game the system. They hide the bugs just enough so checked out management doesn't see them. They convince themselves that those bugs don't matter, even when they trip over them later. They get rewarded because they appear to move fast, eventually become management, and the whole thing gets worse as time goes on.

It's a structural problem. Yes, the level of influence is higher the higher up in the org chart you go, but there is still "power" at every level. Even the most junior developer has power. The worst thing we can do is become apathetic, shrugging it off, saying "well what can we do?" That attitude is one of many factors that got us to this point. Importantly, it is a factor we actually can influence.

That's why I object to it. Not because I think it is going to solve the problem overnight, but because it is a thing we have some power over. And it is a very different situation when one engineer in a team is vocalizing "our software has issues" while most of the team silently agrees vs several members of the team simply vocalizing agreement. There's no magic single variable fix to problems like these, but we got here because a bunch of little problems added up. Unfortunately, or fortunately, the way to solve it is through solving a bunch of little problems. Each seems insignificant in isolation, but they accumulate