I'd say this is a solid portion of the reason. Ideally, we could talk about software in a completely neutral and dispassionate way without worrying about how the recipient will receive the information, or what the potential implications on ourselves are; this is the idea behind no-blame retros and psychological safety, etc. The fact is that a lot of work cultures are not in a state where this works, so even if people might be naturally inclined to do this, they may have been trained not to.
The other big piece of it is... communicating is a messy activity. I'm always amazed how often you can think people are aligned on something, then dig in a little farther and realize that people have wildly divergent ideas of what's going on. It's exacerbated when you have folks who are operating in a second language (this isn't a slight on them, I have nothing but admiration for anybody working as a software dev in a second language - I don't know if I could do it TBH).
>The other big piece of it is... communicating is a messy activity. I'm always amazed how often you can think people are aligned on something
I wonder if this is a bug, or a feature, if you will. Maybe the random distribution of variations in our understandings is an essential part of working as a team.
Let’s say, every ant is trained to react by spitting acid as a XOR: if A or B, but not A and B, attack!
If the social behavior is not a function of the rules, but more driven by whether a given ant believes {A, B}, and this varies in some distribution, I can imagine some interesting outcomes. Perhaps…
One ant accidentally believes A ~B. That is their sensory input but not the truth. They accidentally hit a beetle, score! Wildcard ant! You get to reproduce.
Not clear if that thought experiment extends into cultural differences. I’d say that means different rules, in my take.
But within one group with the same rules, a distribution of different and even wrong information seems like an advantage.
Maybe not for that one poor schmuck who wrongly believed A and B, and got his head bitten off. But antmortized we’re probably all better off.
The other big piece of it is... communicating is a messy activity. I'm always amazed how often you can think people are aligned on something, then dig in a little farther and realize that people have wildly divergent ideas of what's going on. It's exacerbated when you have folks who are operating in a second language (this isn't a slight on them, I have nothing but admiration for anybody working as a software dev in a second language - I don't know if I could do it TBH).