[aleph_minus_one]

> Engineers are often terrible negotiators, we'd rather spend months solving a problem than have an awkward conversation.

My experience is the opposite: lots of software developers ("engineers") would love to do "brutal" negotiations to fight against the "choking" done by the cloud vendors.

The reason why you commonly don't let software developers do these negotiations is thus the complete opposite: they apply (for the mentioned reasons) an ultra-hardball negotiation style (lacking all the diplomatic and business customs of politeness) that leads to vast lands of burnt soil. Thus, many (company) customers of the cloud providers fear that this hardball negotiation style destroys any future business relationship with the respective (and perhaps for reputation reasons a lot of other) cloud service provider(s).