Ask HN: _How to get past “saving face” or other cultural differences?
Not an expert on this but I&#x27;ve both seen it and done it: fear of punishment for asking for help&#x2F;admitting weakness was why I did it.<p>I&#x27;ve had a boss that used our team as his scapegoat to cover his ass whenever he fucked up. When I was fresh out of college at my first real job said boss fucked up his budgeting and blamed us for being unproductive. I offered to work extra to get us back on track and while I was successful... The fact that the project went way over budget and that only 3 people on a 16 person team was at 100% utilization made it to senior management (who was responsible for assigning out work? The boss). Guess who got thrown under the bus for it? It was eventually sorted out but that was the most miserable week of my career at the time wondering if I was seriously about to be fired for sacrificing my time to help on a project that wasn&#x27;t even mine. Ever since that I made it a point to get between &quot;bosses&quot; and my teammates to try and prevent anyone else from going through the hell I went through until I finally left that job.<p>Flash forward some years, a colleague missed a key deadline and I wasn&#x27;t as aggressive about offering assistance as I really should have been. When leadership came knocking I had to fight the urge to defend myself and openly admitted my mistake, because although it wasn&#x27;t my task to do the work it WAS my responsibility to see it through and I was the one accountable for it. My logic was &quot;just as it felt shitty to get blamed for something I didn&#x27;t do, I refuse to let someone else take the fall in my place. Give me liberty or give me death.&quot; It stung and it stung hard. I got absolutely no reward for the honesty and got reprimanded anyway- lost half my bonus, skipped over for senior even though I had the same responsibilities as the seniors, and didn&#x27;t get a merit raise that year or the year after- but I felt good for sticking to my beliefs even when the only outcome was punishment. It was even more amplified when that same coworker went on to become an analyst and later a product owner years after the incident, showing growth and confidence that may not have been realized had I thrown them under the bus like my boss did to me all those years ago.<p>I think this is 100% a leadership problem. If the guys at the top are too afraid to take their whooping like a man how can they expect the grunts to do it? If leadership won&#x27;t formally implement a &quot;no stupid questions&quot; policy what do they think their staff is going to do when they NEED to ask a &quot;stupid question?&quot;<p>Nobody needs to lie to cover their asses if their asses aren&#x27;t at risk just for being human, but (on the US, at least) many walk on eggshells to avoid being the goose&#x2F;gray duck in a sea of ducks&#x2F;not-gray ducks.