Tending to provide solutions as well as the tradeoffs tends to be better accepted. Saying we need to replace all the existing HW, but then it will work once we

Tending to provide solutions as well as the tradeoffs tends to be better accepted. Saying we need to replace all the existing HW, but then it will work once we buy a billion dollars of AWS leaves the decision to people who are paid to make such decisions. I've been there, I worked for a place that wanted to copy a competitors feature set with myself and a couple other programmers, when the competitor had a team of like 200 people working on the same thing. My response was basically, look I might be able to get a prototype in a year or two, but no guarantees on stability, feature set, etc. If we hire a half dozen people, it might be done in two years, but its going to take them 6 months to become productive and then your going to still be missing X, Y, Z. And I assumed that would kill it, but you know I ended up spending a year working on a prototype by myself anyway. Which was "fun" and I learned a lot, but was a giant opportunity lost for the business because it turns out a half ass prototype can't compete with a solid polished product in POCs. edit: This isn't to say "i was right" because in that case the right decision was probably to hire the extra people and make a significant move into that market, given the state of the existing product which died just a couple years later. But the business people didn't or couldn't expend the resources to make us competitive. So, they were probably hoping for a miracle, which many were delivered but a bunch of small miracles doesn't equal a big one.