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by dininski 2631 days ago
I partially agree with you. When I used to work at one of the big five, PMs for my team would regularly disregard the engineers' output on most matters (apart from occasionally letting us make purely technical decisions). This, of course, ultimately led to almost the entire team leaving, including me, and the rest transferring internally. It's not all the engineers' fault. One can push back as much as one wants, but it rarely changes anything at all. However the PMs' success is measured based on delivered features and projects. In most big enterprises the engineers are just worker bees, for the queen PM bee and if they don't perform or don't want to do something, they can be somewhat easily replaced with someone who will. And don't forget that a lot of the engineers might be on a working visa, for example. And why would they jeopardize their job and their way of life on moral grounds, instead of keeping their head down and just going through the motions. I'm not saying that I agree with them, but putting all engineers in the same basket seems unfair. Now that's why realistically it is much rarer for a group of engineers to take a stance than you'd think. This is why cases like the Google engineers who refused to work on military contracts got so much attention. As inspiring and empowering as it might seem, in reality it (almost) never happens.