How do you cope with knowing better

BIG IME - I think sometimes you gotta accept that maybe you don’t necessarily know better (it’s hard, i know).

Especially with dev work (especially open source) - sometimes you’re limited by available technology, time, resources (servers, bandwidth, people, blah blah), etc. Your ideas may be good but not feasible (at the moment), for example.

That’s not to say you can’t put forth your idea - repeatedly even. Keep being part of the conversation and ask questions, make suggestions. You just have to work on letting go of the frustration and seek to do some understanding of your own. The more you understand & learn, the more clearly you can communicate your own ideas using language / frameworks devs or others are more familiar with and the easier it might be to get buy-in for your ideas.

I’ve also found it helps to refine the problem statement - outline the issues and problems without offering solutions straight away & see if others note the same problems? It seems silly, but sometimes it’s easier to get folks on board with problems…

This is a test. Somehow the system won’t let me answer the other comment. Perhaps a sign by the Universe? Hey, it has taken me hours to write that! Could you not tell me earlier. :-)

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.