I was once tasked to build an integration while working directly under the CTO. They designed their own API and claimed there was no specification in the ecosystem that we needed to follow.

I noticed that there was a specification and I informed them that we might want to change our system to match it. The request was ignored and instead I tried to make incremental suggestions to their design to make it more compliant with the existing specification.

We release the system and the first feedback we got was backlash for not following the spec.

We are now 9 months later and the CEO has requested that we follow the specification and I now get to rewrite the system.

I hardly find any motivation to rewrite the system, I haven't talked to the CTO for a few months and now suddenly they offload a bunch of their tasks on us by personally assigning us work and just invites our manager to listen in lol