[arghwhat]

Generally? No. Not because they are not smart, but because in a large company, each individual have different goals and priorities - that's why we have e.g. SREs as dedicated roles - and it takes a bit of effort to find the intersection between all these.

Let's say I work in DevOps and want to optimize cloud costs. In that case, I would challenge the size of everything, the use of higher-costs services, the number of regions, all that - but the team might want more regions and bigger resources to improve latency and performance, and use more high-cost services for developer experience, and ship features without having to think about utilization.

It's a tug of war, and only works when you have forces on both sides to balance out. Being too conservative might stall innovation or make things too slow to save a buck, not being conservative enough might drain funds or make things impossible to scale.

[floorballchamp]

> It's a tug of war,

Yeah, any workplace in which the word "war" was used in the context of colleague interaction saw me leave within a few months.

I like to plan those things ahead of time with all stakeholders involved, then we work together instead of against each other.

[arghwhat]

I believe you are intentionally misunderstanding. The term "tug of war" is not used to indicate armed conflict or even a problem. It indicates balancing forces that you want to maintain - pull the rope too far to one side, and you end up in a suboptimal extreme.

Unless you work with clones of yourself, there will always be differences in opinions and priorities, and not every feature and bug fix can be a company-wide stakeholder meeting, and you certainly will not get any social points for trying to micro-manage other teams.

[floorballchamp]

Of course there will be differences. That's why you sit down and plan things together, pulling in and coordinating with all _relevant_ stakeholders. Of course not the whole company.

But the attitude needs to be "let's put the requirements on the table and see what we can do" instead of "you don't get what you want unless you give me a good reason". The latter comes from an angle of distrust which I'm arguing against. The former comes from an angle of collaborative problem solving.

In a company in which I go to a team relevant to a project and like to engage in a discussion and am met with an attitude of "unless you give us a good reason we'll stop talking to you", the atmosphere is not one that will keep me personally for long. YMMV.

> I believe you are intentionally misunderstanding.

You are free to believe what you like. Opening a reply with such a sentence is pretty sad though. It does not foster a healthy atmosphere, nor does it match reality, I might add.

[arghwhat]

> Opening a reply with such a sentence is pretty sad though. It does not foster a healthy atmosphere, nor does it match reality, I might add.

Your response hitched on a single word ("war") within a common phrase ("tug of war", a game). While it might have been accidental, such answers mislead from the actual discussion (and tends to be used as distractions when no good answer is present).

> Of course there will be differences. That's why you sit down and plan things together, pulling in and coordinating with all _relevant_ stakeholders.

When you discuss new architectures or large projects, this is a given, but this covers only a small portion of company operation - the rest is organic day-to-day work, which slowly but surely distorts initial assumptions. Slowly boiling the frog, so to speak. Think one team making changes that affect request patterns, another team making something that is accidentally quadratic, and a third team suddenly asking for a large number of cloud resources to carry this that should absolutely be challenged.

And at the same time, teams are under different organization units with different budgets, schedules, leaderships and priorities - and most certainly don't care about daily scrum work of other teams.

> In a company in which I go to a team relevant to a project and like to engage in a discussion and am met with an attitude of "unless you give us a good reason we'll stop talking to you", the atmosphere is not one that will keep me personally for long. YMMV.

No one said "we'll stop talking to you", but "you get what can be justified". If you take offense to be challenged and would rather work somewhere else, you do you, but if you can't justify your request I'd argue that you are not doing your job properly in the first place.