As a regular “individual contributor” it is very hard to fight ill thought plans coming “from above”.

Those who complain are usually cast as “negative thinking folks” and get subtle punishments.

If you are on a mid career senior salary range, are you going to pick a fight and risk being punished or carry on getting your good salary, bonus, stocks, insurance, retirement plan and perks - in exchange for slighly useless work?

Not even just fighting ill fought plans but whether we decide to execute well or dial it in. The pressure to ship ship ship comes from a lot of places, and relatively few of them have the technical competence to assess, care about, or evaluate code & quality. They don't actually understand what they're pressuring forward, so often.

And most of them face no real consequences. They don't have to maintain or repair some grossly abomination of a system, that's the engineers job. They'll be leading new feature dev new business dev forever & ever.

As a regular IC, the things you do are largely disconnected from whatever leadership is thinking. You have a lot of leeway to do what you want as long as it implements things that leadership cares about.

Eg. You can build a section of a tunnel to be wider where you think there should be a subway station, even if the president's wife doesn't think there should be a station there. Eventually the station will exist

> Eg. You can build a section of a tunnel to be wider where you think there should be a subway station

And what is your explanation for why it took you twice as long as it did Bob who just plowed that thing with uniform width?

The ground was harder.