The main problem of the author is that he as a developer has not fought development to be perceived as stakeholder. Which is the core of all problems. If every

The main problem of the author is that he as a developer has not fought development to be perceived as stakeholder. Which is the core of all problems. If every tech related decision requires dev to have explicit buy in and commit, and they are equal partners on the negotiating table - a lot of problems then disappear. I have recently been very blunt in some exchanges. "- How big should the project scale? - Infinitely! - In that case I will need infinite time and budget" I got reasonable estimates the next day. As a developer it is your job to get the problem right, to evaluate the business case for any feature request and give a better proposition if the initial requests sucks. And for the hated waterfall - well some big decisions are made at the beginning of the project and are almost immutable - technology stack, module boundaries, module interaction, available hardware. It is once again your job to make sure that recruiting can deliver the right people, that we can procure the needed hardware and so on.