The devs do get some say, but often propose (or “champion”) overcomplicated bullshit in the hopes of being promoted up the engineering chain. That’s why we used to have all these fuckers drawing diagrams with Kafka and Zookeeper supporting a service mesh (provided as a pod sidecar in Kubernetes) spraying events into a topic to be consumed by Flink etc. Usually it’s an internal service receiving 10 requests per hour, which could easily have been handled by a one-page Python program running on a Raspberry Pi. I don’t know if the utter hopelessness and death of craftsmanship caused by companies embracing LLM slopcoding has made all of that worse or dampened it.
Totally agree that a lot of bullshit requirements are mandated by execs though; even when they had their “we do Agile” masks on.
Same here - nitpicky “I would have introduced a factory” reviewers embracing mass-scale slop has been a really jarring thing for me too. Like, I got into this industry because I started programming on the C64 and absolutely loved it… so I have no interest in giving up the thing I most enjoy. But did those nitpicky devs not also love writing code? Otherwise why would they hold up PRs for days/weeks over (usually) purely subjective preferences?
Tbh I’m having a hard time coming to terms with it all. People keep saying “use it or be left behind” - I think that’s what I want.