Autism

Okay, so I'm reasonably neurotypical I guess, but I'm browsing All. And a neurotypical perspective may help, or maybe it won't. And I'll warn you in advance, this may be a bit harsh.

The first basic fact is that the agenda is set by the people who actually do the work (and to a lesser extent, the people who fund the work). The quoted post says the poster is not a developer. So what we're talking about here is "backseat driving," someone wanting to impose direction without providing either work or money. I don't use the term "impose" lightly; the quoted post accuses everyone else of not being open to discussion, of being narcissistic.

The other basic fact is, unless you're in the thick of it, you don't know what's really going on. There are usually reasons things are the way they are. Sometimes those reasons are bad, sometimes they're good. But particularly when we're talking about complex engineered systems, and doubly so when we're talking about computer software, even modest changes usually ripple out and have systemic effects, or require systemic reengineering.

But this is why advice usually isn't welcome, because an advice giver doesn't know the details of what they're advising on. Unless they begin by learning the problem inside and out, obviously, but that takes a ton of time and effort.

Finally, speaking as someone who knows programming very well, the gulf between "why don't you just do X" and the actual work required to do X, if X is even feasible and possible, is enormous. Furthermore, everything comes with tradeoffs, and someone suggesting X is unlikely to understand the tradeoffs, or the tradeoffs that have already been made, and how X might affect those.

All this said, yes sometimes suggestions are ignored or rejected because of ego. This is doubly true when someone is part of an institution, government for example, and wants to defend their turf or they don't wanna spend "political capital" on something outside their personal agenda. This is also true of open source software; if you really wanna see some gnarly shit, try and figure out why LibAV split off from ffmpeg.

If you want the real answer to the question, it is possible to be in charge. The danger with being in charge is that you become accountable for the things you've overlooked. You have to be able to survive your mistakes, then figure out how to avoid them in the future. Being in charge is incredibly taxing, but this is a choice we're all condemned to make: accept things more or less as they are, or put yourself on the line.

This is a rough situation, one I've personally dealt with more than once as well. Personally, the best way I've found to deal with it is to be a little less direct than my natural tendency would dictate. I proposed a section of our wiki dedicated to proposed improvements to our systems. Everyone was okay with this idea, so I then took the time to put a detailed description of my solution there. Eventually, it did get picked up and implemented.

This is a test. Somehow the system won't let me answer the other comment. Perhaps a sign by the Universe? OK let me do it this way:

@[email protected] Thank you for your kind answer.

Perhaps i should re-phrase my post to explain how my mind works. Posting in a neurodivergent forum, i took it for granted that this would be understood or clarification would be asked. I took an example which prompted someone from "outside" to jump on it and comment specifically on the example i gave, and on the fact that i implicitly was honest with it, that i don't know all the technical details (and i notice your comment history is empty, so be aware that you are talking to people who might function differently). Since, i have deleted that part. I could have taken any other example that is perhaps more easily understood and which would not distract so much from the actual topic.

My mind works in seeing patterns and emergent behaviour. One talent that i have, and that i'm really training for the work i'm doing, is to look deep past those patterns in order to uncover the essence of it. So, instead of putting a patch of paint over a disharmony in an emerging pattern (let's call it that because i'm not necessarily speaking of illnesses or errors), i'd come up with the underlying reason why such a disharmony might have come to be in the first place. And i may also come up with a way to take the problem by the root (yes that is radical). Don't know what language would fit you, but perhaps you could see me as a shaman, or as a philosopher, or a process architect. As such, i see the essentials of patterns from a bird perspective, so to say. It's even beneficial to the task to not indulge in all the detail of the pattern itself.
It does not mean that i think i'm always correct or that i know everything (mind the difference to "know better"). I know very well how personal experience is tainting our filters of perception. Especially ND people are often very open with the truth that they naturally do not know everything. -- And exactly that kind of honesty is all too often being taken as an incentive for dismissal.

In retrostpect, i can find it quite ironic how the first commenter actually helped make my point. They accused my of "sidelining"^[1]^ while they were shouting in from the "all" feed, and in a reasonably neurotypical way, taking my (neurodivergent? idk) openness as a point at which to anchor an attack, rather than seeing it as a virtue which could give them the idea to look/ask deeper into the actual subject.^[2]^ Instead they are making the impression (to me) that out of the fact that i was posting this to a ND community they were assuming that i would be somehow unreasonable and that i would not have an understanding of the technicalities in my example, and therefore they could be harshly invalidating it all, including my actual point. I'll leave it to the reader to give that pattern a name.

To answer the rest of your comment: I'm doing all that! With the case of the (now seeming silly) developer example, i do not actually want to get back into programming (have long ago said goodbye to working so much with machines, and slowly i seem to be turning against the machine). So i did leave my analysis and suggestions and hints at certain future development, at several places for others to pick up. I just find that the appropriate structures (technical as well as social) for an organic human interaction seem to be missing, and that can go so far as to foster toxicity (another such pattern, which has an essence in human collective behaviour). That means: no reaction, no feedback, no siding with a reasonable (or not) injection. Just zero immediate effect ... but i see others blowing the whistle as well. --
That is -- online, mostly. Because interestingly, when people get together physically then it's much more likely that social structures emerge which allow for a much more satisfying experience of constructiveness (i'd infer that it's part of human tribal nature, although it doesn't necessarily happen by itself). I'd have much less of a problem within an eye-to-eye physical community of people, where listening and understanding is just a reasonable first-of, and because the people know each other, asking for and acting on advice would be just a matter of course.^[3]^ -- So again, patterns emerge which reflect some structural and perhaps essential deficits.

[1] ... which i actually didn't do but everyone in a community can take their task, and being a technical infrastructure specialist is one such task, being a seer is another.
[2] The speed in which this happened was astonishong, that made me even think of the possibility that the answer was partially computer generated.
[3] "Real-life" example related to the developer example (but please again, it's just a badly picked example not the main topic of my frustration): I have a friend here who is more into networking tech than i ever was, to whom i explained the principal architecture of LemmyNet, and (just the same as a number of strangers who i came across in the forums, who for whatever reason do not want to take part in developer discussions), he was very quickly to arrive at, "that's not the way it's going to work!" -- and having recognised that, we could actually have an interesting talk about network discovery, distributed storage, etc. -- Such happens only when the necessary social structures and trust are established.