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she later told me that I was anti-authoritarian and more likely to do what I thought was right rather than what I had been instructed to do. I am still baffled to this day about how that is an undesirable attribute
It isn't unless you're a corporation trying to keep employees down.
It is if you're the one trying to coordinate multiple product teams and one of them doesn't build to spec, introduces different behavior in edge cases or declares something to be "not their responsibility". Anti-authoritarianism is a bad trait to combine with "being wrong".
Someone who wasn't present during the design meetings, stakeholder calls, planning sessions etc... can absolutely still have very good input regarding decisions that were made. But they should raise those concerns with whoever made the final designs and discuss them, not decide on their own to deviate from the given instructions. They may not see the full picture and cause a ton of delays that way.
You are describing here someone who will get wrong and isn't able to work properly. If this is the kind of person you are looking to hire, then good for you, and your hiring process is perfect. But good employees will hate your company, because you consider them like bad ones. Many people will also end up acting like bad employees because that's how you consider them, so why should they bother?
This the problem with modern management and hr: it is hostile to employees.
Team coordination is now being hostile to employees?
Who do you prefer, someone who:
- Thinks critically about his assignments
- Communicates concerns with his coworkers
- Can intelligently express his reasoning
- Is open to being wrong
- Helps improve a product
Or someone who:
- Thinks critically about his assignments
- Creates alternative designs that they feel are better
- Builds those designs despite this not being instructed
- Creates beautiful software, which ends up incompatible with the other software it needs to work with because they didn't consider various requirements from other stakeholders
- Causes delays and frustration because their stuff, nice as it is, isn't to spec and needs to be rebuilt
You can be a brilliant developer and a terrible employee at the same time. If you want to design software as you like it, you should be in the design sessions. And not ignore the hard work those people already did and throw it out without discussion.
Anti-authoritarianism is a bad trait. Critical thinking and standing up for your ideas is not. I frequently question design decisions I have not made myself, because A) there could be something that was overlooked or B) I'm overlooking something and I don't have a full picture of the scope. Either should be resolved by a quick chat with the designers, not by me ignoring instructions and doing whatever I feel like is best.
Part of being a good developer is also accepting that you might be wrong and your ideas might be bad. That doesn't mix well with anti-authoritarianism.
I'm talking anecdotally and from my experience here, not as an absolute.
I will upfront admit i am somewhat biased against authority in general, especially what i perceived to be unearned authority (if you wish to be a respected authority, earn it and continue to do so) In this case however I'm talking about "authority" in a professional sense somewhat measured against the success or failure of particular projects or initiatives.
For the most part i agree with you but it seems like you are using the term "anti-authoritarian" as an absolute, as in being against authority is bad in all cases.
At a lot of companies "Critical thinking and standing up for your ideas" is considered anti-authoritarian because the company culture doesn't allow for that kind of autonomy of thought (by design or long term evolution usually).
Your example works in the context of a company that works in a manner that promotes/encourage that kind of person, not all of them do. My personal experience and that of my circle of colleagues and acquaintances, I'd guess that percentage is around 30/70 with the 70% being companies that either actively or passively punish/discourage both of those types of employees.
Which i'd imagine is what @bouh meant when they said "But good employees will hate your company, because you consider them like bad ones"
Anti-authoritarianism is a bad trait. when the authority in question is doing the correct things (for whatever definition of correct you wish to use). "Anti-authoritarianism" and "Critical thinking and standing up for your ideas" are not mutually exclusive.
As with most things it's contextual.
You are completely missing the point. The problem is that you are considering employees to be the bad ones, and thus you are selecting them.
If you're confusing "anti authoritarian" with "cannot work in a team", well that's extremely worrying. Don't engineers get introduced to ethics on the work place where you come from? "anti authoritarian" might as well mean "won't agree to do anything dangerous just because your boss told you to". Hence why the author refers to Millgram's.
Anti-authoritarian can lead to difficulties in coordination with other teams. I'm not saying it has to, but it can.
Not doing something unethical from a moral standpoint makes you a good person, but not necessarily a good employee. But in the vast majority of cases engineers aren't presented with morally dubious tasks.
Not doing what you're told because you think you know better is also anti-authoritarian, and definitely would be considered a bad trait to have for an employee.
You have a legal obligation to refuse to do something unethical, so it depends whose definition of "good" you're looking at, the HR dep, or the engineering one.
Not doing what you're told because you think you know better still sounds better than blindly doing what you're told. Employees following instructions they don't understand, when talking about desk jobs, kills any motivation. Let them offer alternatives, and argue a bit. There's a difference between disagreeing and misunderstanding, and I bet the anti authoritarian crowd is more bothered by the latter than the former
Yea, that one point in the post doesn't necessarily make much sense (though this really depends on how the corresponding questions were phrased). Doing what you think is right over what you're told is good if it's a question of morals, it's not good if you're in a situation where you might not have the full picture. Though the correct thing to do when you're told to do something you don't agree with in this case would regardless be to bring it up and have a discussion about it.