[rleigh]

Maybe if you work in the Land of the Free™ and live in constant fear of getting fired for some inconsequential reason, you have to have to abase yourself daily to your manager and act like a wage slave supplicant. Is that a life anyone can really be satisfied with, deliberately allowing oneself to be downtrodden for the sake of a few shekels?

Do you have a job where you simply do as you are told, like a private being shouted at by a drill sergeant, or do you have a career where your expertise and contributions have some significant value?

Work is full of compromises. No matter how hard you try, at some point you're going to end up giving advice or information to people which runs counter to what they would have preferred to hear. "No" is rather absolute. What would be more typical is suggesting that a course of action might be unwise, and suggesting possible alternatives along with the tradeoffs for each approach, i.e. criticise but in a constructive way. And let others decide which pros and cons are most important. You bring specific expertise and insight, and provide that to the group and decision makers, along with qualified recommendations, maybe very strong recommendations if the situation warranted it. Your recommendations and advice might well be ignored, but it's still important to make them in the first place so that they are at least known and considered.

You don't just live your life to satisfy your boss. You also have to live with yourself. Sometimes, for example, companies make very short-term decisions at the expense of their own longer-term viability and at the expense of their existing customers. Who internally acts as the voice of those customers and the future company if not you? If you didn't at least raise questionable design tradeoffs so that the consequences were well understood and informed decisions could be made, you are doing your employer a disservice (in my opinion). It doesn't matter what the ultimate decision is, but that you act professionally and provide all the necessary information for others to work with. If you get fired for trying to do your best for the company, you're well out of a bad company.