My favorite team-building exercise is 45 seconds of unbearable silence on a 60-person call.
Who can tell me xyz? Nobody answers. You stare at the grid of all those faces. One person is clearly eating. Another 20 are off-camera doing God knows what. The rest? Muted. Waiting. Hoping someone else goes first.
Real engineer values silence above all.
Except — no. That silence is actually the most dangerous thing on your engineering team.
Let me explain.
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Google Literally Studied This
In 2015, Google ran a multi-year internal study called Project Aristotle. The goal: figure out what makes some engineering teams crush it while others just... exist.
They looked at everything. Team composition, seniority, co-location, individual talent. The works.
None of it mattered.
The #1 predictor of a high-performing team was psychological safety — whether people felt safe enough to speak up without fear of being punished or embarrassed.
Not technical skill. Not pedigree. Not how many systems you’ve built or problems you’ve solved.
The thing that separated great engineering teams from average ones was whether people actually opened their mouths.
Let that sink in for a second.
The most elite engineering company on the planet studied itself and concluded: the teams where people talk are the teams that win.
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So Why Are We Silent?
If speaking up matters this much, why do most of us still go mute when it counts?
1. We confuse silence with competence. We think asking a question reveals we don’t get it. In reality — if you’re confused in a room of 60, at least 15 others are too. You just volunteered to be useful.
2. We overestimate the social risk. We imagine judgment. But on any halfway decent team, the person who says “wait, why are we doing it this way?” gets thanked. Not laughed at.
3. We mistake agreement for alignment. A meeting where nobody pushes back isn’t a meeting where everyone agrees. It’s a meeting where everyone checked out. Real alignment comes after real disagreement. Just to be clear on that.
4. We assume it’s someone else’s job. The tech lead will catch it. The architect will notice. The PO will flag it. Yeah, maybe. Or maybe every single one of them is thinking the exact same thing you are: somebody else will say something.
Spoiler: nobody does. And then it ships. And then it breaks.
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What Really Happens When You Speak Up?
Let’s flip it. What happens when you do say the thing?
- You catch a misunderstanding before it becomes a production incident at 2am.
- You surface a constraint nobody else was thinking about.
- You give permission to 15 other people who were also too afraid to talk.
- You earn a reputation — not as “difficult,” but as someone who actually cares.
The best engineers I’ve worked with aren’t the quietest ones. They’re the ones who say “I might be wrong, but...” and then say the thing that changes the entire direction of the project.
That’s it. That is the way.
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How to Start?
If this is hard — and it is for most people — start small. No need to go full TED Talk in your next standup.
1. Ask one clarifying question. “Can you walk me through that part again?” Boom. That’s speaking up. Done.
2. Use the chat. Voice won’t cooperate? Type it. A question in the Teams chat still counts.
3. Prepare one thing before the meeting. One observation. One question. Just one. Lower the bar.
4. Name the awkwardness. “This might be a dumb question but...” is a perfectly fine opener. Nobody has ever actually thought the question was dumb.
And at the end — if your team punishes questions? If you get shut down for asking “why”?
That’s not an engineering culture. That’s a fear culture. And that’s worth naming too.
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What being an great engineer actually means?
Stay quiet, don’t rock the boat, blend in — that’s comfortable.
Know that every high-performing engineering team on the planet runs on the opposite:
Speak up. Ask the question. Challenge the design. Say the uncomfortable thing.
That’s not being difficult. That’s being an engineer.
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