No, some of that is horrible advice even at a healthy functional organization. You don't want to break rules silently, defiantly, or row in the opposite direction.

Leadership should be establishing cultural and communication norms. So if you have ideas, questions, concerns, for example - you don't need to break rules or work against the engineering org vision, culture, or process.

Mistakes and learning and being busy and lack of communication process aside... You should be expected to have a negative consequence for following some of this advice. It'd be well deserved.

Now, hopefully, you have some excellent managers who can help guide and support you...but if we have articles like this that kinda drive the behavior we don't want to see and people put more trust in random internet junk than they do their managers. That's a problem.

> No, some of that is horrible advice even at a healthy functional organization. You don't want to break rules silently, defiantly, or row in the opposite direction.

Breaking the rules Silently/Defiantly is being a diva and that is no good.

I've had to inform superiors that I disobeyed their instructions to get something done, I had a good reason for doing so (it wasn't at a whim). You should do this sparingly and only when you established that you are competent enough to make that call.

Sometimes you do need to push back hard against people. I've had to call co-workers and have an unpleasant conversation because repeatedly didn't even check something compiled. I was fed up with it and my superiors had done nothing, it was stopping me from getting my work done.

> Leadership should be establishing cultural and communication norms. So if you have ideas, questions, concerns, for example - you don't need to break rules or work against the engineering org vision, culture, or process.

I've found that even in "(more) functional organisations" cultural or communication norms are typically broken or preformative.

e.g. I worked in one org where there were things obviously broken on a website and no bugs were raised because "there wasn't a requirement for it". Now I could have raised it. I felt like they should of immediately raised it, because it was so obvious (it wasn't the first time either). I deliberately left it an entire fortnight on the site to see if any of the QA raised it. Nobody did. I then used this an example to highlight the fact that people weren't thinking. It was a various the old "teacher leaves a deliberate mistake in to see if the students are paying attention". I shouldn't have to resort to high school teacher tactics.

Sometimes you have to be very disagreeable for people to take notice.