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Honesty and Openness In The Workplace
Why is it that telling the truth or speaking up about problems is often extremely difficult in a software engineering job?
Fundamentals
I’ve worked in quite a few different jobs over the years, primarily in software engineering of course, along with an elongated period of study in academia (frankly, I wish I’d never left but that’s a whole other story) and can categorically state that workplace communication in software engineering has got more fundamentally broken over time.
In every role I’ve worked, either as a contractor or permanent employee, there’s always been that strangely familiar underlying feeling of ‘us and them’ that pervades the workplace.
This is especially prevalent in permanent work (as contractors really don’t care for workplace politics at the best of times as long as their timesheets are signed) where what seems like a 1960s UK style of class division continues as some kind of bizarre digital divide between technicals and non-technicals, or more precisely managers and developers.
Admittedly it’s probably exactly the same in most industries, but I remain surprised in what is effectively a relatively new industry, that really only took off during the 1940s, has become to be divided so unequally in so short a time.
