I have found that it's very, very easy for some people operating in bad faith to turn ANY opposing argument into a violation of "politeness" and "respect". A real example from an internal discussion I witnessed once:
A: We should use $FRAMEWORK for everything in $APP because it provides a better developer experience. Sure, long list views might be slower, but we hardly ever need to care about long lists.
B: Almost every screen in $APP is a long list! I don't think we should compromise performance on $FEATURE, $FEATURE, or $FEATURE for this -- benchmarks suggest they'd be four to five times slower.
A: [to B's manager, cc HR] By making such an obvious statement as "almost every screen in $APP is a long list" in a public Slack channel, B made me feel uncomfortable by implying I wasn't familiar with $APP, even though I've worked on it for several years. That is an unacceptably disrespectful way to hold a technical discussion.
How much harder is it for someone operating in bad faith to turn the lack of politeness and respect to their advantage? My personal experience would suggest it's even easier.
[dang's pretty good about enforcing politeness and respect, so I won't try to present any examples. :-)]
AFAICT, B was polite and respectful while engaging in open debate. The problem here is A, not B. The problem is _not_ the requirement to be polite and respectful.
> AFAICT, B was polite and respectful while engaging in open debate.
Yep.
> The problem here is A, not B.
I'm pretty sure the implied problem is "B's manager" and "HR".
> The problem is _not_ the requirement to be polite and respectful.
The problem is that this requirement is not seperable from the details of how it's interpreted and enforced, and in a plurality of organizations that talk about "politeness" and "respect", it is in fact interpreted and enforced in a A(-hole)-ish manner, rather than a manner based on actual politeness and respect. Conversely, organizations that care about actual politeness and respect generally don't belabor the point as much as those that use it as a flimsy excuse, so people tend[0] to see a explicitly "'polite' 'respectful' org" as warning sign of the latter.
0: rightly or wrongly; I'm not sure how the statistics work out on that one.
TL;DR: as other people have pointed out, the scare quotes are there for a reason.
Sure, but now the case is before HR and B has to waste cycles defending themselves. Or, depending on just how dysfunctional the place is, they never even hear of the false accusation until months later when it has already metastasized through the organization.
Obviously people should be polite and respectful, but when there is too much posturing around these facts, it's easy for malicious actors to weaponize.
A: We should use $FRAMEWORK for everything in $APP because it provides a better developer experience. Sure, long list views might be slower, but we hardly ever need to care about long lists.
B: Almost every screen in $APP is a long list! I don't think we should compromise performance on $FEATURE, $FEATURE, or $FEATURE for this -- benchmarks suggest they'd be four to five times slower.
A: [to B's manager, cc HR] By making such an obvious statement as "almost every screen in $APP is a long list" in a public Slack channel, B made me feel uncomfortable by implying I wasn't familiar with $APP, even though I've worked on it for several years. That is an unacceptably disrespectful way to hold a technical discussion.