While I agree completely that "human work and relationships building" in organizations is a more practical way to work with people than the author's strategy, i

While I agree completely that "human work and relationships building" in organizations is a more practical way to work with people than the author's strategy, if I were to call any of the people in the story "awful [...] to work with", it would have to be the people from the dashboards team, who apparently wanted to own the dashboard page but not have any of the responsibilities of actually building it. To be clear, it wasn't the author's preference to have another team build the page their team needed. The dashboard team insisted on doing things their way, then deprioritized the task, bungled the implementation, and finally delivered a trivial amount of work, six months after promising to do it. And sure, everyone has different priorities, and may not understand the urgency of tasks in the same way. And it's only human to want to promise to do things for other people, and therefore make them happy. But promises by themselves aren't enough to get work done: when I'm in the workplace, I don't want wishes and happy thoughts, I want people to deliver. If someone tells me to hold off on doing a one-day project, because they're going to do it for me, and rest assured, it's on the roadmap, even though we won't tell you when we're going to do it, because quite probably, the answer will be something like "never, as long as we have more fun things to do" --- well then, at the very least I expect to be told as much, so I can avoid throwing my project into that particular black hole. If they can't, or won't, communicate realistic priorities and deadlines, then they might be great to eat lunch with, but I definitely don't want to work with them on a project. Office jobs, in my opinion, tend to play host to microcultures which value politeness, sympathy, and relationship building so highly that these virtues start to displace and eclipse the honesty that is the cornerstone of serious, professional work. I come across this theme over and over in these kind of "story-rants", a theme that in the telling can come off as rudeness or abrasiveness on the author's behalf. Those who are keen to interpret it as such, should keep in mind that this says as much about them, and their own opinionated view of how the workplace should operate, as it does the authors of those stories.