>I had one job where there was a lot of technical debt, but my manager did not respect me and my colleagues had what was basically a "learned helplessness" attitude. So I'd go around trying really hard to make things better, but everyone responded to me like I was just crazy or naive or didn't know what I was talking about.
Heh, the job I just left had a team like this.
I'd bring up ideas _for discussion_ all the time, at the very least to make my team members reconsider how we handle certain things. Even if my idea weren't the accepted one, we really had good reasons to improve our status quo. Yet just like what happened for you, when I'd call out some issue or situation the response from the team was that I misunderstood something or was crazy or etc. It gave me a lot of self-doubt, but I'd also bring up the issues to a senior engineer and he'd agree that usually my topics were worthy of at least some discussion since they had the potential to become improvements.
What would drive me crazy is pointing out code that _clearly_ did not do what it was supposed to do and get back, at best, a shrug. I think I'm pretty open minded on most tech topics -- I started with PHP! If the code works I'm happy, everything else is gravy! -- but to have people insist that, no, this is fine and, yup, being on-call with services guaranteed to wake you up at 2AM at least once during your rotation and our stakeholders sending nasty grams once a month is just normal... crazy making.
Heh, the job I just left had a team like this.
I'd bring up ideas _for discussion_ all the time, at the very least to make my team members reconsider how we handle certain things. Even if my idea weren't the accepted one, we really had good reasons to improve our status quo. Yet just like what happened for you, when I'd call out some issue or situation the response from the team was that I misunderstood something or was crazy or etc. It gave me a lot of self-doubt, but I'd also bring up the issues to a senior engineer and he'd agree that usually my topics were worthy of at least some discussion since they had the potential to become improvements.