I know exactly who she's talking about! When I was at the unnamed company I worked on a project that he retained control over and said no to a lot. We found tha

I know exactly who she's talking about! When I was at the unnamed company I worked on a project that he retained control over and said no to a lot. We found that if we sent him a very well reasoned, documented and measured change he'd say yes. I was there when the no swap policy was under lots of active discussion. It was there to ensure that application authors could have strong expectations on how long a memory access would take. Imagine trying to provide evidence that removing the "no swap" policy wouldn't affect any of the applications that were running across a very large infrastructure. Her point really resounds though, this person was referred to all the time in conversation, "well, we probably couldn't get this past X". He was mythical. In general that was often a good thing. Making changes that could have such a broad impact should be well reasoned. But it's also quite annoying, having a nagging voice inside your head that just says "no", seemingly disconnected from the actual source.