[giantg2]

People above me making decisions that don't make sense.

This can be a business process. Maybe it makes more sense use a simpler business process for mundane systems, like fee collection, than to spend tons of money building out a complicated system with lots of edge cases. Good technical systems need a solid underlying business system.

This can also be project or technical leadership. For example, why would you commingle business content and system data I'm the same field? And then if someone changed that field and broke your system and it doesn't comply to json standards, but they refuse the roll back this cosmetic change... that was so frustrating. It felt like a complete waste of time. Work smarter, not harder. More like work stupidly and be political.