Bad idea. I want people working around me to notice, be uncomfortable and especially speak up if something is amiss. Unless you work in a malignant environment, this should be normal behavior.

Everyone can talk and give opinions. The real question is if you can actually make a difference. I tell people there's a gap between knowing how to do something and actually doing it. And that gap is a big part of our engineering skills.

If I'm not going to change something, I'd rather not talk or give opinions.

Related: https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-...

Absolutisms like this are challenging to strike right because an establishment of context is needed. This post's sentiment sounds like regret and resentment over past events (there is trauma), and the author knows to not put their hand on the stove.

Sometimes not speaking up is the best thing for future situations. Other times, it's too costly to not speak up, and what should follow is the speaker making right by their words: action.

It can be helpful to flip the lens from critic to creator. Instead of asking "what's wrong with this thing" instead ask:

  Who deserves praise?
  What spark here deserves to grow?  
  What new thing am I trying myself?
  Who left today better because I showed up?
  What's something I (personally) could have improved?
  What mistake or new facts have I learned from/ widened by view?

In many companies (especially in non-tech departments) there’s a culture where the first person to speak up is given credit for an idea as the “visionary”, even if they have no skills to actually implement it. In those environments, speaking loudly and often allows one to “lay claim” to an idea. This can be beneficial as a way to control workload, if you “claim” the idea first, you can control people’s expectations and timelines around building it.

Strategically, “stop talking” means nothing unless you would otherwise be slamming out ideas. You don’t need people who don’t talk, we have plants for that. You need your silence to say something.

Most problems have been solved except the ability to align incentives.

Until the desired outcome is defined and documented, holding off on solutions and effort would benefit both parties.

I get it. This is roughly me, I don't always have the best answers, but I know most things can always be done better. I've coined a few different terms over the years such as "marketing driven development" when I wind up working in places where the marketing team is driving the devs off a cliff, and pushing new features at the expense of ever having time to deal with technical debt. The industry really needs "Tech Debt Thursdays" or something.

There's always way more work to do and those key enhancements or research stories that could improve everything get deprioritized.

> The difference between “annoying senior sysadmin” and “good consultant” is often just whether you’re in a room that opted in.

So much that. No one likes "drive-by advice" - if you want something to be fixed, there should be a person responsible for that. Maybe it's you doing all the work, or you convincing management, or management who is asking for an advice... But if you are just saying "we should fix FOO by doing this and that" with no plans as to whom those "we" are, it's only annoying.

> unsolicited wisdom

A big problem I see constantly is the mindset that it's "wisdom". It's audible in the voice every speaker that thinks it true. No matter when it's said, no matter how many self-aware disclaimers precede it, it comes out annoying as hell (e.g. Lex Fridman). Some people, even when they know they're are doing it, can't stop themselves.

Communication bandwidth is a finite resource, as several years of managers have reminded me.

(Although, it's worth noting that in this era of more remote work, perhaps a little more read-in and context is useful to avoid burning time on back-and-forths that used to take minutes in front of someone's desk but can now take hours over Slack).

what this misses (and unfortunately is not always an option, especially in larger orgs) is that instead of talking (read: complaining), just fix the damn thing and present the solution on a platter (on company time, of course). more often than not, if you've already addressed the issue and it's ready for primetime, people will not refuse the change.

if they do, there's an equal chance that you either didn't understand the situation to begin with, or you work in a team with poor leadership and strategy. learn from the former, leave the latter.

This is terrible advice that will hurt your career progression. The problem isn't that people speak out too much. It's that basically no one is proactive enough to speak out. In my experience the people who speak are the people who get promoted.

This so obviously AI slop

> So the survival skill isn’t knowing what should be improved; it’s knowing when to shut up. Not out of apathy, but out of resource management, for self-preservation.

The not $x but $y pattern.

Honestly, I use to write like this probably before LLMs - and didn’t notice how cliched it was.

But now if I notice myself using that pattern, I rewrite it.

This isn’t coming from my own thought process so it’s hard for me to think about how I would rewrite someone else’s work today, maybe -

Survival depends on having a sense of when to stay quiet. It is a deliberate choice to conserve energy and protect your stability.