> Having half of the company’s engineers enmeshed in an endless loop of proposing changes and being told no was totally fine - they didn’t need to be productive anyway, and this way they weren’t impacting business-critical systems.

Well, it's a take. This is pretty cynical.

Doesnt seem very testable of a hypothesis. As a company thats trying to get things done, doesnt it make sense to have someone help you prioritize by telling you when some decisions have long term costs?

Making up a guy to get mad at.

This is trivially incorrect outside of SV.

There are plenty of slow moving projects that focus on the stability of the codebase if you work for a business that isn't a "tech company" and work on services instead of products.

Earlier submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48245331

Beautiful write-up, thank you.

One aspect that still bothers me is that you claim the just-say-no-engineer "was a critical role during ZIRP." I might be in the minority here, but I don't hold that same stance. I wonder if I am alone in that?

> desperately chasing new capabilities and features that can make money

Ah yes. And.. where are those?