| I can't speak for whether or not this behavior can be trained "out" but I can share what I have noticed and my own personal experiences. On the part of people being trained, as I mentioned in another comment, I've seemed to notice that a lot of my Indian and Chinese coworkers, for probably cultural reasons, seem to have this sort of "respect the decisions of 'elders'" mentality and see it as extremely confrontational to disagree with decisions even if in their personal experience they know or have faith that it won't work. My personal issue was always that I didn't actually know enough about my domain (distributed systems/"backend") to sometimes refute decisions that I had a gut feeling were bad (for example, never had seen anything like a proposed solution being done that way in the open source community or outside of our team -> red flags starting to go off), or that the people who were in my management chain or even more senior coworkers, would refuse to teach/mentor me or even point me toward the correct learning resources. I ended up spending about 3 years of my free time outside of work learning as much as I could about these subjects (operating system internals, database engines, learning the network stack inside and out, distributed systems primitives, etc etc). What did I find once I actually started questioning people based on this new knowledge I had? Not a lot of them actually knew what they were talking about. They either couldn't teach me because they themselves didn't know, or they were just afraid to say that they didn't know these things and didn't want to look "stupid". Long story short, this was the "process" that personally made me extremely confident in being able to call people out on their bullshit since I actually had the means to defend myself objectively. As a side note, going through this process of intense learning also made me realize that _most_ people don't know any of these things but like to talk as if they do, rather than just admit that they're not experts or unfamiliar with it... |