Managers will care if your API's are a contract with your end customer (e.g., your product is providing APIs), and you're watching your NPS scores.
I feel like this could have been said without the sarcasm and it would have been a great discussion starter. Instead a potentially valid point/retort will be obscured by the tone and discussion surrounding it.
For example:
> Unfortunately large organizations often struggle to get groups into alignment on issues like this, unless there's a strong mandate from the top down (e.g. Amazon).
No sarcasm or snark, same basic substance.
Top down mandate cannot align 130k employees on every topic, even if that attempt were an appropriate thing for upper management to spend their time on.
There might be a more interesting conversation if context were given. If the comment about management not caring about RESTful APIs is coming from someone working as part of a team focused on public APIs, it’s a lot more interesting than someone working on desktop clients.
Edit: You know what, you’re right. I read the comment as a flippant “pft, that’s not my experience” and responded as such. I should have assumed better intent. Maybe the commenter was questioning why their experience doesn’t match up with this. Maybe they were asking why management isn’t pushing this effectively. I assumed a specific intent and should have considered different potential intentions.
It’s also unrealistic that everyone underneath can focus on many mandates at once. Which leads to the loss of credibility when mandates start getting ignored out of necessity.
At Microsoft the number of simple mandates like this one are numbered at least in the hundreds.
Realistically, mandating RESTful APIs at the exec level is unlikely to be a big win for Microsoft. The teams working on APIs at scale are largely already doing this (and you’ll notice multiple groups represented by the authors). The teams that aren’t doing this are largely not building APIs that benefit a great deal from RESTful APIs, because they’re building internal APIs or similar and RESTfulness would be nice to have but not particularly impactful.