“Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”
Wow, I am floored at so many comments painting an egocentric view of the author.  I find it highly ironic that supposedly high EQ neurotypicals would not be able to take one small step back and evaluate what is written with a modicum of assumed good intent.<p>Take this example:<p>&gt; <i>A manager came to me asking if we should rewrite the checkout of our E-Commerce platform using React because they had read a blog post about another company doing it.</i><p>&gt; <i>[...]</i><p>&gt; <i>In this particular situation, the discussion never got past the first question.</i><p>My reaction to this is, yes obviously an engineer should be asking these questions, and it&#x27;s a huge red flag that the manager didn&#x27;t entertain even the first one.  Obviously we don&#x27;t have that managers side of the story, so I take it with a small grain of salt, but on the other hand the issue is articulated very clearly, and it is decidedly <i>not</i> personal or egocentric.  In fact the questions are exactly what I as an EM expect my senior ICs to be asking.  This demonstrates ownership and good thinking about the overall cost and impact of resourcing decisions.  Good systems can not be built by managers dictating things without buy in from the expert ICs who actually build and maintain them.  Therefore I think it&#x27;s completely bass-ackwards that we would ding the IC for a communication gap (regardless of neurotype)—I&#x27;ve seen far too many cases of teams just doing what they&#x27;re told and driving off a cliff because everyone prioritized agreeability and had a very narrow view of their own responsibilities. When the shit hit the fan everyone just throws their hands in the air and says &quot;not my job&quot;.<p>So let me first say, kudos to you larve, you are the type of engineer I want on my team.<p>Now that said, some feedback.  Describing office politics as &quot;playing mind games&quot; does you no favors in terms of being understood.  I know what you mean—office politics often involved bending over backwards and dancing around issues to avoid offending people.  This is not my idea of fun either.  That said, morale matters, and this song and dance is a big part of how morale is managed for allistic people.  Furthermore, there is a fundamentally difficult issue which is if you have 100 smart people, building consensus through complete understanding is impossible.  At some point owners need to be identified, decisions made, and progress begun. Some people will need to &quot;disagree and commit&quot; with partial understanding.  Given your experience I don&#x27;t expect you would disagree with that in any way, but when folks are short with you, consider the difficulty of reaching such consensus.  I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s an excuse for shortcuts, but this is the art of technical management, and it requires hard work and a commitment to building trust and understanding from all parties to have any hope of realizing large scale technical achievements.