My experience is that people in technical jobs (like many people on HN) work on teams where facts and logic dictate how things are done. People are free to spea

My experience is that people in technical jobs (like many people on HN) work on teams where facts and logic dictate how things are done. People are free to speak their minds as long as they say reasonable things. I think this is the case because work like engineering tends to have clear requirements and you can more easily argue about how to meet them. I've worked more and more with non-technical teams, where the end of the goal of the work is not as clear cut. On those teams, people speak up less and authority by title is a lot more important. I think this is because there is not necessarily a right or wrong approach to a lot of the things they work on (or at least they don't see it that way) so arguments are less logical and feel more like ego trips or power struggles. This may not be 100% accurate, but my main point is that technical people probably don't have a clear picture of this power struggle scenario from the pov of non-technical people. It's just a very different work environment.