Quickly saying “no” to ideas is extremely harmful
A pattern I’ve observed in my software engineering career is the different reactions senior engineers have when new ideas are brought up.
Sometimes when an idea is presented (usually by a junior engineer), a senior engineer will chime in very quickly to emphatically describe why it won’t work. This is extremely harmful to team culture for a couple reasons.
First, it reinforces the bias toward authority for senior engineers. When any engineer brings up an idea, even if it’s overall a bad idea, there is always a nugget of truth — they observed a real issue and offered a real solution. Immediately shooting down ideas discards this truth.
Second, it signals to other team members that it isn’t necessarily safe to bring up new ideas. Psychological safety is one of the most important factors in overall team success, and signaling that new ideas can be shot down very quickly harms the perception of openness. It’s a failure when only engineers who have already developed a thicker skin (likely through previous bad cultures) can contribute.
What I’ve seen be successful is when the senior engineer takes the time to understand why and how the junior engineer is suggesting the improvement. Through both of these questions, the team can learn something new, and it signals to other team members that new ideas are accepted openly and serve as an opportunity for learning, not a reinforcement of power dynamics.