It keeps on puzzling me why don't engineers ever speak up. Like "Hey, man, I understand the old design sucks and you want to make it better, but editing things directly would only make the delays bigger. How about you take a few screenshots of the product, photoshop it the way you would like it to look and then we, as a technical team, will use our best expertise to make it look this way without breaking everything in pieces?".

That could have saved you from weeks of hell and would also increase your influence by a great amount.

Because "shut up or find yourself another job".

I thought this too until recently -- got fired after trying to protect my employer from a toxic exec.

There are some that do not accept anything but yesmans or silent codemonkeys. It sucks but it pays. If you are not willing to lose your position, just let it go.

Protecting your abstract "employer" from a toxic exec is a political suicide. The right thing to do is sniff out who's the exec's political enemy and what move is he planning next against him and aid that person in his move without directly confronting the toxic exec. It's dirty politics, but it works.

Yeah.. Lesson learned I hope...

Am I naive to think that in a business setting, problems should be constructively confronted proportionally to the extent of their damage potential directly with their author? Wouldn't the business be able to grow more efficiently and be able to keep a peaceful environment free of backstabbers if people could accept that everyone makes mistakes, that they don't really matter as long as they are fixed quickly, and that they are all learning opportunities that can become valuable assets? I feel like am I throwing buzzwords around and that to some extent I have always heard this in a form or another but for some reason, never seen it put into practice.

You need to look at the company's cash flow and competition model to understand this. Let me try to sketch 2 black & white scenarios:

A) The company is bootstrapped, profitable, gets positive cash flow from paying customers and is investing profits into adding new features that will cover larger markets. Its competing with other bootstrapped companies on how fast it can add features.

B) The company is VC-backed, runs at a loss, gets it cash from rounds of investments. A competitive factor for getting more capital is showing rapid growth and creating an impression that the company is sexy, has a great future, etc. A competitive factor in getting rapid growth is offering services subsidized by the venture capital and getting high-profile salespeople through the CEO's network.

In the first scenario it's all about the product. In the second it's all about the CEO's ability to sell the right impression to the venture capitalists.

Things get more complicated once you bring in psychology. The people that are good at confidently overselling a product and giving a perfect impression are usually people-oriented. They can give a good impression, and they draw their motivation from impressing others and glorifying their social status. If a person you're talking to starts dropping hints about how much of a big guy he/she is, that's the personality type I'm talking about and you don't want to confront that person because you'll be seen as a personal threat regardless the long-term effects. This doesn't benefit the long-term product quality and efficiency, but will benefit their self-confidence (hey, I'm a big boss, nobody dares object me) and will help them attract more venture capital and get more high-profile sales people aid their course.

So yes, in many real-world scenarios everyone is talking about results, learning opportunity, positive environment, growth, etc. because this is a part of the impression you want to make, but in reality everyone is backstabbing each other because if you don't do this, someone will backstab you.

Plenty of software jobs pay and don't involve working for someone who expresses outright contempt for your role.

In my experience, it's "shut or find yourself another engineer".

Normally, people that does that do not know enough to care about keeping good technical staff.

What is also another good way to say that, shutting up or not, they deserve to be out of an engineer, so go immediately looking for another boss.

At my last job, my sort-of technical director liked to edit live prod deployments when someone came to him with a "fire" (which wasn't ever actually a fire anyway). After the 2nd or 3rd time, I locked him out.

It's not a mainstay, I wrote that you don't need to focus on design instead of functionality and that a $50 template will be ok.

The goal is to develop a sense of good design, so you can pick a good template or hire good designers later and argue about the results of their work.

Where I write code we use git hooks to run linting and unit tests on pre-commit and integration tests on pre-push, and anyone using --no-verify gets a stern talking to. No one gets code in to the repo if it breaks the tests.

I'm still working on a way to stop commits that drop the coverage below a threshold so even new code can't be added if it isn't tested.

Apple got to where it is (=more liquid cash than the US government) off the back of good looks and fashion.