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Engineering culture needs leadership and executive support to succeed and thrive. Blaming failures stemming from top down mandates and directives is unfair, because if the grunts don't follow orders they'll be given poor performance reviews or expediently managed out (aka Fired).

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To some extent, yes, strong leadership can squash engineering culture.

But if engineers never push back, how is leadership supposed to know they're asking for dangerous things? For most engineers, that means explaining risks and/or engaging more senior engineer. For L8 and up, it is absolutely their job to say no to leadership.

And that's all ignoring things that should have been done here which wouldn't affect the timeline. Leadership doesn't care what order you deploy things in.

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