I probably could have been clearer about that.

I think as an engineer it's your job to do a bit of cost / benefit analysis on what you're being asked to build and at a minimum provide a rough estimate about the time / effort it will take to build and maintain so everyone is on the same page. And sometimes I think it is your job to argue that something shouldn't be built at all.

I guess a good example of this would be at the place I worked a few years back... When I first got there one of the complains I would hear a lot from the business was that the site was too slow and that every time they asked the dev team to improve it they only managed to make limited improvements.

So I took a look into it and realised that the main issue was that we had something like 20 marketing scripts running on the site. When I started asking why we have [x] script someone would always provide me a valid reason, "Oh, Sally and her team use that for [y] reason". Okay fine, so then I ask Sally if we can remove it, but she obviously says no because this specific tool best suites her team's needs.

You could argue no single dev was really to blame here. At each step along the way they were just adding a single script to fulfil some business requirement, and as a team the devs couldn't reduce the number of scripts to improve performance because they were all deemed essential by the business.

But I think this is exactly where a good engineer would start pushing back against the business. Given this was a large corporate I spent a few weeks escalating the issue higher up the business until I finally got authority to start removing scripts and was able to put in a process for requesting new ones to be added. Imo the main issue here wasn't even the scripts themselves but that the dev team just didn't have enough authority about what they were being asked to build so they'd knowingly build crap because was what the business was asking of them.

Me pushing to remove the majority of these scripts and give the dev team more authority pissed a lot of people off. Several teams were arguing that it was going to have an impact on their performance, and in some cases that they couldn't do their job at all. Higher up in the business people were pissed because now the dev team started saying no to them for the first time ever, but overtime the benefits of this became obvious to most people. Site performance improved dramatically, the dev team were spending way less time fixing bugs, we were able to prioritise dev tasks like upgrades, etc. And eventually a few people even thanked us lol.

I guess I'd never actually say, "no I'm not building that at all" - this is just how I feel a lot of the time. I think it's more about explaining costs and trying to get everyone onboard that something shouldn't be built when it doesn't make sense.

> if you're writing an app, you can't say to the client, "Don't add this potentially revenue-generating feature because it'll introduce bugs."

See this actually worries me - why do you feel like that? If you think what you're being asked to do could introduce bugs and you're not convinced about how much revenue it will generate then you probably should be having a conservation with the client about whether it should be built in the first place imo.