Top notch post. Personally, my experience is that intelligent people don’t get blocked. They just find a way to not be. Including optimizing for human relations to work well for them. “Hey, do you know where the docs are? I tried looking at A, B, and C”. “Ah they’re in Z, okay, I linked to that from A.”
When you find someone who is easily blocked, they are either unintelligent or antagonistic and in either case the best thing is to find a way to release any power that person has over you. Life is too short for the unproductive to hold you back.
The curse of big companies is that in order to scale they need to constrain the variance of engineers. So you end up with coworkers like this. Imho life is too short for that.
This guy sounds like an asshole. (Apologies for assuming gender but it also sounds like a guy) life is too short to work with assholes.
That being said, if the docs were in Confluence I’d never have been able to find them. (I guess I wouldn’t be an asshole about it and politely request the link again)
The weird thing is being an asshole doesn’t seem to be a permanent condition. I worked with an asshole once. He was bright and capable, but short with anyone he considered beneath him and quite mean about it. I ran into him years later and he’d acquired a healthy dose of humility. I wish I knew what taught him that.
Probably work experience and experience with other people like himself. I've had newbies come into places I've worked absolutely convinced that they had all of the solutions to our issues. As if the simple solutions they propose simply hadn't occurred to anyone else. Nothing could convince them otherwise, and nothing prevented them from implying that the incumbents were simply incompetent.
Until they'd try to implement those solutions and discovered all the reasons why they had been dismissed as the answers to the problem. Of course, that didn't stop them from attempting to blame everyone else for their lack of success as they now had the gift of hindsight.
When you find someone who is easily blocked, they are either unintelligent or antagonistic and in either case the best thing is to find a way to release any power that person has over you. Life is too short for the unproductive to hold you back.
The curse of big companies is that in order to scale they need to constrain the variance of engineers. So you end up with coworkers like this. Imho life is too short for that.