Right? I was going to ask OP "have you ever asked anyone?"

Because, IME, managers, etc. love it when you show an interest in how the business works and where your part fits in. It also makes their job easier if they can relate the crappy stuff they have to assign you to how much benefit the business gets from it.

I must be doing something wrong because most of the time, getting interested in the wider impact of my work is held against me. I just ask why they want the stuff, suggest alternatives, point out issues, and the next day I'm an uncontrollable Maverick that means to rewrite everything and waste a ton of time…

This also happens after explicit requests for feedback. Maybe they didn't actually meant it and I'm supposed to "take the hint" or some neurotypical bullshit, but when I hear such requests I tend to take them literally, and provide real feedback on the real issues. Unfortunately for all of us those tend to be stuff that ossified years ago and cannot (or will not) be fixed any time soon. Ever, in my experience. Quite the downer.

Last time this happened I ended up being axed from a wave of layoffs. Whether their short term workflow and subsequent technical debt finally caught up to them, or their parent company just wanted to cut costs, I will never know. I do know my technical expertise was highly praised, and middle management felt I wasn't quite aligned with the goals of the company, whatever those were. (I think one significant cause was that I only emailed them about significant problems, and kept to myself and my team lead when it was smooth. I think in the future I will stop trusting them with anything negative.)

So yeah, I can bet they love it when you act interested about their work, but start questioning their decisions (even just the one directly related to your own work and its likely impact on theirs), and the tone of the conversation changes very, very quickly. At least where I've worked.

>start questioning their decisions

I'm not privy to any discussions you've had, of course, but I will comment on this because I see it in many tech people: don't question people's decisions. No matter how you phrase it, it will appear critical. And people (neurotypical or otherwise!) don't like criticism, no matter how much they claim to welcome it.

Those "explicit" requests for feedback? They want positive feedback. If you really must say something negative, suggest the opposite in a positive sense instead. i.e., instead of saying "we should not have done X. It was a bad idea," try saying "I think if we had done Y, things would have worked well" while avoiding any potentially embarrassing references to X.

Also

> neurotypical bullshit

Be careful that you're not "othering" the person you're talking to and dismissing their concerns because that's what I think when I read this.

The reason I speak of "neurotypical bullshit" is because people around me have several times suspected I'm on the spectrum, and I noticed I have a hard time dealing with subtle social cues. One manifestation of this is when someone asks me something with a straight face, I tend to assume they actually want what they asked for.

When someone asks them feedback so they can improve, I tend to concentrate on what could have actual impact, and this heavily biases towards negative feedback: the build system is bulky and not well documented, newcomers waste time on it, we should replace those global variables by messages if we actually meant to do an actor model, this piece of code is 10 times bigger than it needs to be and will drag us behind if we port it as is…

To be honest, phrasing the above in a nice way that avoids hurting people's feeling is exhausting. They want to know how to make their system better? Well, here are the parts that suck the most, addressing those should have the biggest positive impact. Short and to the point. Oh you didn't want me to tell you that? Why did you fucking asked then?

Here's the thing: You're right. And also you're not.

Sometimes, often, feedback is about timing. The time to talk about how better to architect a thing is when it's being architected, not 2 months later. Instead of "This is crap" try "Hey I know this works for now, but there's room for improvement here. Next time we're talking about a system like this can I help with design? I have a few ideas what we might improve".

Volunteering to do the work of implementing your improvements goes a long way to making people more receptive to feedback. Otherwise you're just giving people homework and they almost certainly already have enough of that.

edit to add: Yes, creating change is work and it is exhausting. That's why organizations value people who can pull it off.

I wish I could have that good timing, but I'm rarely hired early enough.

Hey 3 years from now the mistakes you’re making today will look like “Wow I wish I was there, that loup-vaillant guy sucked” to some new hotshot :)

That is to say: You can start now. There’s always plenty of new mistakes to make.

It's not that I wish I was there to prevent past mistakes. I just wish I could be allowed to fix the mistakes I see with the power of hindsight.

But there's worse: most of the time they already know. The various issues I balk at were often bothering them for years, and yet fixing it was never the priority. Week after month, there always was something more pressing, generally about some deadline. Such issues often have gone long enough that the cost of keeping the current cruft have long exceeded the cost of replacing it. But this cost is gradual, so the fix keeps getting pushed further and further into the end of times.

Perhaps my biggest mistake is not seeing that such organisations are beyond helping. I keep getting fooled by promises of doing things right going forward, when I should instead extrapolate the past. Either they're already work in ways that I can approve, or at least live with, or I should seek something else on the spot.