The least productive teams I've been a part of are the ones where everyone is waiting for their turn to say why an idea is bad. Sometimes being "too smart" can hold you back from building something genuinely new.

It's definitely a more nuanced topic than I think the article leads on. There is a right and wrong time to apply the brakes, but you can still be critical in either case.

There have been numerous times where I have identified real issues with an idea, advocated we crack on anyway and ended up with good results. Often you can't know for sure if an issue will even be that insurmountable until you get to it.

But there are other times where the risk/reward isn't lining up, or the risk is very well known, you've tried it before etc. Then hit the brakes, back to the drawing board for another try.

I think the danger is when people treat ideas as precious. In a well functioning team, your idea is going to get picked apart, modified, morphed and implemented by others. Get over your attachment to the idea as your baby, and you get to really enjoy the process.

Common failure mode in environments that promote being the best over getting things done: If you went from school to college to industry always identifying with being better than everyone else, because that's what it takes to get in the door, sometimes you miss the transition to when you're already in the door. A lot of people don't realize they were supposed to put their guards down until it's too late. It's too bad but this is what the cutthroat labor pipeline rewards.

The vast majority of software engineers is never tasked to do something genuine. It's the opposite, you are tasked to improve, expand and maintain things under very specific constraints. Corporate work is by default anti innovation, the company has made the innovation and wants you to maximize its profits.

Also many great innovations or discoveries have outlived extreme opposition. The problem isn't people saying no, the problem is having non-sociopathic people being reluctant hearing no.