Heh, this reminds me: at a former employer, the eng team communicated exclusively by IRC (when Slack was already a thing) specifically because the CTO had previously experienced his communications being picked apart and taken out of context when his old company had ended up in the scope of a congressional investigation. So that's one way around it...
Why? I’ve ragged on my employers in DMs, and will often express very blunt concerns about quality/risks in emails or PRs. Providing my opinions in such channels is part of what I’m paid to do. If my employer doesn’t heed my advice, manages to majorly mess something up, and my comments come back to haunt them, why is that my problem?
Because openness and transparency requires emotional security as a prerequisite. Surveillance and transparency are not the same thing. If you subject people to an all-seeing eye, people will default to covering their asses, and you will not get the information you seek.
Attempting to force people to be vulnerable by unilaterally being open about your own vulnerabilities is manipulative. You will get "my biggest weakness is that I care too much"-type deflective responses at best and a cold shoulder at worst.
In companies, a culture with emotional security is built first in private one-on-one meetings and spread from there - it never originates in a public (public within the company at least) setting.
> Because openness and transparency requires emotional security as a prerequisite. Surveillance and transparency are not the same thing. If you subject people to an all-seeing eye, people will default to covering their asses, and you will not get the information you seek.
> Attempting to force people to be vulnerable by unilaterally being open about your own vulnerabilities is manipulative. You will get "my biggest weakness is that I care too much"-type deflective responses at best and a cold shoulder at worst.
> In companies, a culture with emotional security is built first in private one-on-one meetings and spread from there - it never originates in a public (public within the company at least) setting.
I'm a little confused... Did you mean to respond to a different comment?
I’m not sure how this relates to what I asked at all. If something I said at work gets leaked to the public or a regulator, that makes my employer look bad, why should I worry about that? That sounds a lot more like their problem than mine.
> Attempting to force people to be vulnerable by unilaterally being open about your own vulnerabilities is manipulative.
This comment makes no sense to me. Aside from not relating to what I said, I cannot possibly see how being open and honest is forcing anybody else to do anything. Personally I speak my mind wherever I work, and if my employer doesn’t like that, I’m more than happy to find a new job. Ironically, the only people who have ever had a problem with it are middle managers trying to cover up after themselves, and incompetent people that were somehow promoted to technical leadership roles they had no business being in. People I have no problems upsetting.
> Personally I speak my mind wherever I work, and if my employer doesn’t like that, I’m more than happy to find a new job.
This is more or less my point. If your employer was happy with it, then your employer was the kind of employer attempting to build a transparent organization (and worked to build emotional security etc.). If your employer wasn't happy with it, then you and your employer have different opinions on the importance of transparency, which points to a cultural mismatch, which points in the direction of parting ways.
The key insight is understanding that it's the employer, not the employee, who have both the responsibility and the power to set culture and direction. So if the employer decides not to work on building transparency into the culture, the employer will get an opaque culture as a result. Maybe this results in the kind of problems that Boeing is suffering from now, maybe it results in bankruptcy, maybe not. The employer is responsible and accountable to decide. The employee's decision is much simpler - adapt or leave. Most people decide to adapt; the potential upside to leaving is a murky gamble taken on faith, particularly if people don't have a specific offer lined up at a specific place that seems to be a better fit for specific reasons. So it shouldn't be a surprise to you that employers get what they (intentionally or unintentionally) incentivize.
They can come back to haunt them, come back to haunt you, and come back to haunt people you like at your company who get caught in the blast radius if your words are misinterpreted. Because when written material is disclosed and published, the person who made the original on-a-record statement doesn't usually get to testify as to what they meant, and your words will be interpreted by a litigious party hostile to the interests of your company, and sometimes by the public (after having their expectations primed by the litigious party hostile to the interests of your company).
If you believe that your "ragging on your employers" can stand that level of scrutiny, then by all means, commit them to writing.
I think you missed the point, "will often express very blunt concerns about quality/risks in emails or PRs" means he straight up communicates any issue without sugar-coating. Which is what you want from a conscious employee. If despite that someone higher up in the decision chain ignores the issue (in the case of safety risks, that is criminal negligence), to continue to fight this battle is pointless and would only mean risking one's career for nothing.
I think there's a fine line between communicating without sugar-coating and speaking past one's own local knowledge of a problem that a lot of engineers don't recognize.
There’s plenty of ways that an IC can misconstrue managers not acting on their advice, and usually they come down to a lack of understanding the organisation, or immaturity. Having learnt a lot of those lessons the hard way throughout my career, I’d like to think I usually don’t fall into those traps.
The most common one I’d say is when an IC thinks whatever they’re concerned about is much more important than the organisation thinks it is. In such a situation, as long as I’ve communicated my concerns to the right people, I never have any bitterness about an organisation accepting risks I’ve raised after proper analysis (unless of course, it has some impact, and then they start politically back pedalling the risk acceptance).
Personally, due to the nature of my work, I am often brought in to contribute to projects that are either well under way, or nearing completion. I will often find things that I think are risks or other issues at this stage. Any time this happens, there’s a whole bunch of things that could explain what I’ve found. Perhaps I’ve made a mistake in my assessment, perhaps there’s some mitigation (planned or otherwise) that I’m not aware of, perhaps they already know about it and have accepted it, perhaps there’s some major constraint I don’t know about... So I ask around and try find out if there are any easy answers. If not, then I’ll escalate it to other stakeholders. Usually phrased something like “I’ve noticed this, I think it’s an issue for these reasons, and could potentially cause such-and-such an impact”, sometimes with “I’d suggest we consider this alternative approach” and potentially “I’d recommend delaying delivery of this project to address these concerns if necessary”. Even at this stage, I don’t know all the facts, so I simply express my thoughts without claiming to have any definitive conclusions, and trying my best to qualify them with where I believe the limits of my knowledge/understanding are.
In a well run organisation, this will result in my concerns being proven either founded or unfounded, previously known or previously unknown, and some sort of action could result (even if that’s only risk acceptance, further investigation, or plans for future mitigation). In a dysfunctional organisation, my concerns will either be dismissed off the bat, or pointlessly argued about by political actors.
In my experience the latter reaction will usually come from incompetent management trying to conceals their failures, or incompetent contractors trying to defend their billable work. In the first case I’ll just make plans to leave the organisation. In the latter case I don’t really care. I’m a contractor myself, so my job is to deliver value to the employer (who would usually be happy with me in such a situation), I’m not particularly concerned about whether my work satisfies other contractors in that respect.
I think the OP’s assumption – or at least hope – is that if they identify a problem so severe that disclosure would be a serious liability, then their employer will heed their advice, and fix it. The shared goal is producing quality results, not covering anyone’s ass (either OP’s or their employer’s) when they don’t.
