alt Hacker NewsFrom https://drmaciver.com/2020/06/you-should-complain-about-it/ :
"""I worked at Google. Google has an internal philosophy of “Don’t complain, fix things”. This is, on the face of it, a proactive and positive philosophy that empowers people to make changes in the workplace.
It’s not. It’s a horrible, coercive, tool of abuse that is a fairly central part of why it only took me six months at Google before I burned out hard and had to quit for the sake of my mental health.
The problem with an attitude of “Don’t complain, fix things” is that it means you can’t point out problems without taking on an obligation to fix them. This means that you can’t point out problems that are too large for you to fix, and that you’re reluctant to point out even problems that you could in theory fix because it increases your workload.
The result, at least in the part of Google that I was in, was very much a culture where people had learned not to notice problems."""
Replies
I'm not sure that was responsible for this particular "bug"; a horrible "UX" designer overruling everyone else's decisions is more likely, as the current trend seems to be driving UI density to new levels of spaced-out uselessness.
This sounds like the kind of thing that is good for startups, where everyone sits at the same table, including the big boss. But once a large corporate structure sets in, it degenerates.
In spirit, "don't complain, fix things" means you can do things without asking for permission, as in "don't complain if you can fix things instead". If your software crashes because it misses a null check, just add that check and move on. Don't request to have it included in the next sprint, assign it points, have it prioritized by some manager, only to have it assigned to someone else who will then call you back for explanation. Here "don't complain" means something more like "you don't have to write a ticket".
But once the corporate hierarchy comes up, fixing something without telling managers becomes unacceptable, how are they going to meet their KPIs if your work doesn't show up on their dashboards? The saying stays, but it becomes perverted into "don't complain unless you can fix it", which is the complete opposite of the previous idea.