[marcus_holmes]

I think this was TFA's point about "engineers have been begging to be involved earlier in the process forever". Which is absolutely true.

It has to be someone's job to push back on the Product Guy's stupid idea and answer all the awkward questions about the not-so-happy path with it. Unfortunately, because of the way we've ended up with this process, that person is often the engineer tasked with building it, without any effective political power to challenge the design process.

[alkonaut]

That's a software developer's main job. Saying no. Or in rare cases saying "yes, but".

If there is a "hierachy" where product managers are seen as superiors to software development, i.e. where product managers decide what to and then only delegate the implementation to software developers, that product will invariably fail. Don't do that.

[serallak]

But that it's not really the case in the example above.

It's not the software engineer duty to know about how a given product is legal in what regulatory environment. That is something that must be hashed out upstream, well before tasking somebody to write a program.

Granted, an expert engineer with strong domain knowledge could be aware of those kind of pitfalls, and offer insights during the product development phase. But again, that should be done before committing to a schedule or making implementation decisions.