[californical]

I think your chart is incomplete, because in the bottom-right quadrant, there’s the caveat that they never ask for clarification and blindly do the wrong thing.

Then when you have to go back and tell them the basic assumptions that they are wrong about, and that they have to redo tons of work, you lose a giant sum of hypothetical points

[_greim_]

My theory is that devs often trade pretense-now for research-later. This habit allows them to gain ~0.002 status points here and there. But now combine that with unknown-unknowns. The thing they're hearing—if they actually understood it—ought to cause them to abandon or completely rethink a change they're currently working on. But because their takeaway isn't new knowledge, but a placeholder for potential new knowledge, they end up losing 15 status points when it blows up, in a way that was utterly unforeseeable.