> As usual HN comments are more on point than the article....I've lost count of how many times something was proposed and rejected by everyone in the chain except the C-suite. Then the C-suite overrode the process decisions basically because they played golf with someone outside the company.

You're just naming legitimate stakeholders (the C-suite) and asserting that they're illegitimate.

I grant you that playing golf is a cartoonishly pathological [1] version of it, but yes, there are always people more powerful than you in the organization, and if they have an opinion on what you should be doing, then you can either try to convince them (i.e. politics), or you can give up. Not playing is not an option, and being obstinate is a good way to get fired.

So maybe a case of HN comments being "more on point than the article", but primarily in the way that it directly illustrates what the author is saying: engineers routinely bail out of the politics, to their own detriment.

(FWIW, all of the items in the parent comment's list are even less extreme, and more reasonable, than your own. For example, if you throw up your hands in disgust simply because your colleagues want to use a new tool, you're gonna have a bad career.)

[1] and likely apocryphal - there’s probably something going on that is more rational, and characterizing it as “picking the golf buddy” is a cope.