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>In reality, SWEs want 5% control, just to do the thing they have to ask you as a platform engineer to do anyway

My experience has been product engineers ask for full root permissions when they need 5% and immediately report anything less as an impediment.

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My experience as a product engineer and lack of root is that I spend 50% of my time asking people to do things that I could have done myself in 5 minutes.

I’ll confess that I sometimes break something that takes a day to fix, but I’m not sure if that’s worth it.

Especially considering I regularly wait weeks until platform can get around to fixing my specific issue.

I’d say you’re still in a somewhat decent position. I miss those times. The real worries start when you realize you’re spending the other half of your time fixing bugs that would have never come to existence if you wrote it the first time.

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