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In seven years working at MongoDB the one thing I have learned is technology is never "forced down the throat of the engineers". Developers have choices and would not stay in an organisation that made decisions that way. The reason developer relations exists is the acknowledgement that developers ARE the decision makers in most technology selection.

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I recently worked for a company where a different popular JSON document database was in fact forced down my throat.

I proved that a regular database would be orders of magnitude faster with a real example on real data and while the project/product was canceled for marketing/sales reasons. Until it was canceled we were told by multiple levels of "technical" managers to use the worse database because of unknown reasons.

Technology selection is a black art in many companies. Sounds like people were open to listening to the opinion of a developer in your case. Often-times the selection heuristic is habit or history. The right companies will pay more attention to reasoned arguments of their own developers.

The wild part about it was that they were trying to use elastic search for relational queries because some manager thought it would be faster than a relational db. (It was about 60x slower)

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