In my limited experience, this is rarely so simple as to being able to push back on a technical decision when the reality will feel like pushing a square throug

In my limited experience, this is rarely so simple as to being able to push back on a technical decision when the reality will feel like pushing a square through a circle peg. I mean, as rightfully pointed out, if the reasons are more political than technical, pushing back can have nefarious consequences for the people involved. Doing our jobs as engineers is about raising the alarms when needed, but, if all you get is resistance back... Assuming it's not your product, not your company and your ties to the thing are mostly technical... Then if advocate for the "not your problem" attitude and you can simply be content to let it crash and burn and show up the next day with a mop to fix it. Dealing with incompetent management is never nice or easy, but I'd advocate that as software developers, we're quite privileged because we get paid pretty well, work is versioned in source control and most messes are physically unseen, and cleaning up is "usually" not a big deal.