Why senior engineers let bad projects fail

I've been at my current company for ~4 years. Every January the upper management folks kick off the same project and every year it dies in the planning/discussion phase. Maybe one or two other "big" projects or initiatives will "start," but it's always the same: lots of meetings between the managers without the engineers or designers, lots of hype about the "big project," meetings start to get delayed, roadmaps and plans never materialize, then people stop talking about the project altogether. Sometimes I buy into the hype because I believe in the projects, other times I try to point out issues/risks. Either way the engineering team as a whole is always ignored.

What keeps me motivated is doing what I can for the people who _actually appreciate_ what I do. I work in manufacturing and spend a lot of time talking to the people on the factory floor. There's nothing better than hearing about their struggles and then a few days or weeks later coming back to them with "Hey, I heard you saying you're having an issue with X, so I made Y. Want to try it out and see if it makes things easier?" And then when they stop by my desk to say "Hey sibit Y is awesome!". That makes the job just tolerable enough to not leave.

I've never worked at a company as large as Google but in my experience things can be a little more optimistic than the post. When earn enough trust with your leadership, such as at the staff/architect level, you'll be able to tell them they are wrong more often and they'll listen. It doesn't have to be a "$50,000 check" every time.

That leads to a very important question - Why doesn't leadership always trust their engineers? And there's a very important answer that isn't mentioned in the blog post - Sometimes the engineers are wrong.

Engineers are extremely good at finding flaws. But not so good at understanding the business perspective. Depending on the greater context there are times where it does make sense to move forward with a flawed idea.

So next time you hear an idea that sounds stupid, take a beat to understand more where the idea is coming from. If you get better at discerning the difference between ideas that are actually fine (despite their flaws), versus ideas that need to die, then you'll earn more trust with your org.

- It will adversely affect me directly (e.g. cause me to get paged a lot)

- It will harm users or other people outside of the org (various kinds of externalities)

Otherwise it's the company's problem. (Of course, I'm generally happy to give advice and critiques if asked.)

The only alternative is to advocate for inaction, but then why are they paying you? Those kind of bets can make sense for private equity investors, but not for employees, and my builder-brain just finds them dull and annoying.

This clause is doing a lot of heavy lifting. One needs to have good judgement about when and how to help. A lot of people can imagine how things could go better if a bunch of other people changed their behavior in surprisingly simple ways. It's a much smaller subset of people that can correctly push the right buttons to get the other people to actually make those changes succeed at a systematic level.

In a small org it's actually not too hard for good ideas and feedback to get traction. In a larger org for broad concerns it can be fiendeshly difficult. Often the reason why a large project will fail is only truly knowable by a few senior technical people with enough experience and broad context to see the forrest for the trees. Past a certain volume of people involved you can not explain to people why it will fail fast enough to offset the army of clueless stakeholders incentivized to socialize a good-sounding narrative convincing everyone that we need to try. In these cases reductive explanations with the right counter-narrative can work, but they require significant reputational and/or hard authority to pull off.

This is why the article advocates picking your battles in a large org. Often the chance of actually helping is much lower than destroying your own reputation, even if you're right.