In my company (not a small one) and in any previous ones, I’ve never even thought that people could be afraid of giving honest feedback. I’ve seen internal feedback causing change, I’ve also seen it being ignored (sometimes to be listened to later after all, sometimes it turned out that things weren’t as bad as they seemed), but I’ve never perceived any potential for negative repercussions.
So if that is indeed the case here, then it does indicate some problems.
Uh, that’s actual the default behaviour I’ve witnessed at small and large companies I’ve worked for: complain or be critical of the shiny bright path that executives push you onto, and you’ll be branded a nuisance to suppress. Rule n.1 of survival has always been “don’t rock the boat”. The one time I felt safe enough to speak my mind without filters, I eventually paid the price for it.
Sure, my point is that it makes little sense to jump to these conclusions with so little information, especially since this is not the point of the article.
> Why stay at a place that doesn't value your ability to think? Or, worse, doesn't value the thoughts of anybody below a certain rank?
That's the over reaction part. The fact that two engineers feels uncomfortable expressing their feelings, says very little about the culture or values in their company.
It could be that they are just too introverted or insecure to speak up about most things, or that they have a good relationship with the fellow engineers in that other team, and don't feel like ruining it by telling them, that their contributions to the product sucks.
If the original commenter had said, "if any two engineers feel uncomfortable, you should definitely quit right away", then you'd be right.
But that's not what was said. It was correctly described as a possible management problem, a signal. If your notion is that one should leave at the first signal, that's something you bring to it.
Anyhow, we have evidence that the problem is more widespread. It's obvious from the HN reaction that quite a lot of people hate this feature, engineers especially. But still it was released. If you want to hypothesize a situation that makes that unimportant, you have to dream up a lot more than two extremely insecure engineers.
While I can appreciate some healthy skepticism on how widespread the practice is, welcoming honest input from rank and file members of any company can be extremely valuable to improving the quality of products, and many successful companies realize this and encourage such feedback
