[kenjackson]

In my 30 years in industry -- "we need to do this for the good of the business" has come up maybe a dozen times, tops. Things are generally much more open to debate with different perspectives, including things like feasibility. Every blue moon you'll get "GDPR is here... this MUST be done". But for 99% of the work there's a reasonable argument for a range of work to get prioritized.

[_tlo4]

When working as a senior engineer, I've never been given enough business context to confidently say, for example, "this stakeholder isn't important enough to justify such a tight deadline". Doesn't that leave the business side of things as a mysterious black box? You can't do much more than report "meeting that deadline would create ruinous amounts of technical debt", and then pray that your leader has kept some alternatives open.