Advice like this introduces a dangerous blind spot: It assumes the engineer is always right and their peers and manager just don’t understand:

> It can be deeply alienating to know things don’t work the way they officially should, but to have nobody to talk about it with.

There are instances where this is true, obviously. One of my more frustrating job experiences was getting hired late into a startup where the founder had already hired their friends, who were not familiar with the domain, into all of the decision making roles. Being stuck in a workplace where the necessary knowledge is absent from upper ranks is very frustrating. As I learned, the real solution is to leave.

The problem that occurs with advice like this blog is that some engineering personality types will see it as affirmation that they are right and the business is wrong even if that may not be true. I can’t begin to count the number of engineers I’ve worked with who went off and chose to work on their own priorities or did some of the other techniques mentioned in this blog when they were not right. It causes a lot of problems for everyone and doesn’t help that person’s career at all.

Before you go out and use some of this strong-headed “dangerous advice” in blogs like this, do your best at the diplomatic approach. It sounds cool to become a “grifter” and work on your own things like this blog suggests, but you’ll get much farther if you simply become someone who is good to work with and trusted. Trust leads to more autonomy and freedom. Becoming a “grifter” and going your own way does not. And if you’re not right about your own decisions, you risk blowing a hole in your trust that can be hard to recover from.