The "don't rock boats" is really what can slowly destroy companies. The -nx engineers know a lot of other -nx engineers that can come onboard until the stable boat just sinks.
Sometimes things just need to fail naturally and some rando on a mission to “rock the boat” is a net negative.
Picking your fights is an important thing to learn too, throwing a fit over everything “wrong” can be terrible for everyone… even if you’re right every time.
People have limited bandwidth. Especially, it takes a lot longer to fix something than it does to just point out that it's broken. You can be right in every problem you point out, but if you point them out all at once, nobody can fix all that. Pick one and point it out (preferably also suggesting a path to fixing it), and then work with people to get it fixed. Keep your mouth shut about the others while this is going on.
> Picking your fights is an important thing to learn too, throwing a fit over everything “wrong” can be terrible for everyone… even if you’re right every time.
Agreed, most of the times it does not even make any sense in the grand scheme of things to go on those kind of crusades. Also, don't be the saviour no one is asking for.
It's not that bad engineers only socialize with other bad engineers - but rather that many naïve and inexperienced engineers are much too kind, and will try to onboard every friend or relative they know, without ever having worked with them - they're basically vouching people blindly.
This is something I've seen myself: Clueless manager hires the wrong man for the job -> wrong man is utterly clueless on how things work, what needs to be done, and flounders around for a couple of months -> wrong man decides that, hey, I know this one guy that seems to know his sh!t, let's get him onboard. Just fast-track him through the process.
Turns out the new guy is also wrong man for the job, and doesn't know what to do. So now they're two (wrong) guys doing busywork while the ship is sinking.
