Please consider rewriting this in a way that does not seem to unnecessarily attack parent. You are not wrong about the incentives, but you may not be right about the execution of the restrictions. I should know. I am living through it.
Claiming you have no idea why the managers had to do this felt to me like avoiding any responsibility
Our policy is quite permissive for exactly the reasons I conveyed above. It takes an extremely finely-tuned sense of value and high assurance that you’re on the diminishing return portion of the curve to conclude “SWEs should have this precisely metered amount (rather than zero or ‘as much as they don’t waste’)”
My claiming to have no idea was not an abdication of responsibility but rather a claim that it was likely an error (assuming a non-trivial team size and a business that can continue to grow).