Rationalizing the Irrational
What's the most outrageous thing you have seen rationalized at work by management or the general culture at your job.
“There’s a saboteur in our midst”
"Only the paranoid survive"
Worrying about the quality of design comps, when engineering isn’t going to build it that way anyway.
Questioning someone’s engineering quality/system design with concrete examples got attributed to personal attack by upper management.
Animal noises as a method for communication during daily scrum.
“I would never do that so neither would the customer.” - heard from upper management, product, marketing, tech, and just about everyone else who isn’t a customer at various points in my career.
Also, “we have to get it done in [insert ridiculous timeline] because X said so.” This is accepted as gospel truth with no desire for pushback even though nobody got an estimate beforehand. Another one... using “voice of the customer” terminology to justify expending large resources to build something only one confirmed customer (out of hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of customers) would want.
“Don’t worry. This won’t see production anyway.”