It could be a crap environment, or it could be that your team is bad at communicating, or any number of other things. We've ran into cases before where competin

It could be a crap environment, or it could be that your team is bad at communicating, or any number of other things. We've ran into cases before where competing advice was given to mid or jr devs by senior members and they waste cycles spinning in circles trying to make everyone happy. However, with some communication, things get cleared up fast. In this particular case, the recommendation to the dev running in circles was to get the folks with different opinions together at the same time and talk it through. More often than not, there are misunderstandings on both sides. A quick discussion can lead to unblocking things, stopping the spinning in circles, and get things done. On the other hand, the people you work with could just be lacking in professionalism and you can always change to a new shop. In your particular case, it is unclear to me if you pushed back. If someone asked you to find a way to do 'x,' and you already tried for a considerable time, I'd expect any non-jr dev to push back saying they've tried and they don't see anything and to either seek additional help or escalate the issue to get a resolution -- I would not expect them to spin more wheels unless there was a consensus from the team or higher ups that 'x' needed to be done.