[bsandert]

> The company is bigger than you are, its decisions weigh heavier than yours. Stop with the ego-belief that you know better than it.

You sound just like a church.

Friction is good, differences in opinions and priorities are good. Especially in a creative environment. When a part of that is silenced based on just organisational/hierarchical arguments, everyone involved will become less effective in one way or another.

I do agree with you that after not being able to fix the organisational problem, walking away is not the cowards path.

[vinceguidry]

As an individual contributor, your ability to fix organizational problems is limited and efforts to do so are almost inevitably plagued by wishful thinking. You're just not in a position to be able to change how people think about things. Your skillset is not with people, it's with code.

[skewart]

That really depends on the IC and the organization. That's probably true at some places. At a 30 person startup you'd be amazed at how much individual engineers can change things.

[soft_dev_person]

And here I thought I was cynical...

[rglullis]

> Especially in a creative environment.

It is not a creative environment. We are talking about mid- to big-sized projects and companies here. Not the scrappy startup, not the open source consultant shop, not the small niche application for your Macbook.

Differences in opinions are good, provided the team as a whole is reasonably aligned. Too much divergence and this "room for creativity" becomes a schizophrenic organization.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Did the development team in this example become more or less productive after it became "reasonably aligned"?