> the more effective engineers who understand these priorities are given more respect and authority. The problem with "given more authority" I see is that man

> the more effective engineers who understand these priorities are given more respect and authority. The problem with "given more authority" I see is that management plucks these engineers out to make their day job basically "sit in meetings" if you're even slightly effective at simplifying life for everyone else. Because that is the place of most leverage to place those people, but then those people are in a constant tug-of-war with the first group of "fresh ideas". Eventually, the people who are in charge of the "prevention of bad architecture" become the bad guys because they (or me, I'm projecting) get jaded into just finding out what's wrong with something as fast as possible to be able to keep up with that workload. You go from a creative role to a fundamentally sieve role with destructive tendencies, where you are filtering out the good from the bad as fast as possible, be. First of all, not all new ideas are bad and "there's something bad about X" is not a "let's not do X". Secondly, going from making things to shooting down things is intellectual suffering if you have a bit of empathy. Some people on the "committee" with you don't have empathy & literally enjoy it - you're either trying to damage control on a case-by-case or building a "these assholes need to be fired" doc out of the meetings. I realized what I would become if I conflated authority and respect ("respect my authoritah!"). Quitting was really the only way out of it. But it wasn't hard to explain to my spouse that i needed to leave for a job a level down and which paid half as much, because she could see me bringing my "why the hell do we have to do this" attitude home & to family decisions.