[ryandrake]

I used to work with a founder who would deliver product ideas and our roadmap by saying things like "If we were smart, we would [do X, Y, and Z]." Implying that we (the company in general, or engineering in particular) were not smart now, but need to change our ways to smartness and do X, Y, and Z. I'm not sure how else to interpret these kinds of passive-aggressive jabs.

[atmavatar]

My immediate reaction is to wonder whether he/she is privy to some information I'm not which would make X, Y, and Z a priority, whether he/she is overlooking or ignorant of some other factor which would make them not worth doing, or some combination of the two. As such, I'd likely try to strike up a conversation to see if we could reach a mutual understanding. I'd certainly hate to be working on the wrong thing because I was the one missing something.

I suppose if it happened regularly enough, and it was clear the founder usually spoke from a position of ignorance, I'd eventually disengage and start to dismiss them out of hand, but I can't say I'd ever take it personally.

While the founder could just as easily have said "I think we should do X, Y, and Z" instead, I'm more than a little concerned at how easily someone would shut down over the original statement, which strikes me as mostly harmless.

[swatcoder]

I don't know your old founder and can't speak for them, but generally, that kind of phrasing is just idiomatic, and not meant to be parsed literally.

It's just a colloquial way of saying "I've earnestly thought about X, Y, and Z and think it's the most effective way path forward" or "my intuition is telling me X, Y, Z is the best way to go"

It's a way of expressing that they have a strong sense of how to proceed and the "passive-aggressive jab" that you hear is just an artifact of the idiom not being familiar or natural to you.

[lovich]

Or it’s a shitty boss who’s averse to direct conflict and leaves little hints for their employees to interpret like tea leaves.

Can’t really tell which situation it is without more information but both are common

[ryandrake]

Yea, it's hard to convey the non-verbal cues that came along with the phrase. The way he would say it was just dripping with superiority and sarcasm: "If we were -smaaaarrt- [pause to look at the rest of us peasants]... then we would make this so much better..." The unspoken message was really not hard to interpret: "If I was blessed with SMART engineers rather than a bunch of dummies (and I'm looking at you)..."