[BlargMcLarg]

There are entire cultures which function this way. Even in the Anglosphere, the far majority of people won't talk about most their issues until designated times and prompted by bosses.

You're overestimating the proactivity of most people, and how important that proactivity is beyond making an impression one is proactive at a job interview (read: faking it). And the willingness of others to endure what a large crowd of truly proactive people would do when constrained by a huge management overhead: complain a lot until they are fired or finally given the power to solve their own problems.

[jseban]

> There are entire cultures which function this way. Even in the Anglosphere, the far majority of people won't talk about most their issues until designated times and prompted by bosses.

Yeah, for example the military and factory work. But not team work environment, it does not function this way.

[BlargMcLarg]

Upper thread already gave you the ESL example. You're taking things out of context and arguing a strawman.

Most people aren't proactive. End of. To think otherwise is to dismiss what modern schooling does to individuals and to forget the downside of proactivity: increased friction when people can't agree on what they want. If we agree communication is important, surely you're not going to dismiss the obvious that most people suck at trying to come to an agreement when everyone is trying to play proactively.

There's a reason management methodologies are so tight on synced up moments of conversation and prodding people to talk even when they themselves like there's nothing to be said. It's all to push people into talking. You can do that with reactive people. It's not optimal, but it works and is a lot more feasible than trying to create a culture with mostly proactive, total strangers who somehow agree enough not to devolve into death by committee.

[jseban]

You're the one who's using the straw man here to argue about why team work itself sucks and bring up that some people can't speak english.

The assumption is that you have a proactive team work environment, for example scrum, which is how the vast majority of all programmer jobs are, and that the people involved can all speak fluently in a common language.

[BlargMcLarg]

>why team work itself sucks and bring up that some people can't speak english

The ESL argument is pulled in not because of language, but because some cultures prefer reserved people over proactive people. Not sure how you missed this.

"Why team work itself sucks" is a huge leap in logic from "reserved, reactive people can function in a team". Taking your own example, a military with bad team work would leave its country ripe for takeover.

There's nothing about software development in particular which makes reactivity dysfunctional. What is true is proactivity is preferred when applied in a certain way. Turns out many proactive people are proactive for reasons which make them butt heads whenever they disagree. Your "proactive but also collaborative" people are unicorns, because the very things which make them proactive either cause friction, or aren't rewarded appropriately.

>for example scrum

If anything, SCRUM shows exactly how we really think about proactivity. Scheduled rituals which prod people to respond, trying to get some semblance of that "proactive but collaborative" gold, only for most people to still feel suffocated by management when it turns out that proactivity includes futile efforts in telling management to change what is preventing the team from working more efficiently. You can call this dysfunctional SCRUM, misapplied or whatever you wish, but the far majority of these places still turn profits and create products despite of this.