Absolutely, and this sort of thing happens in large companies as well. Software engineers are great at providing “well, why don’t you just..” answers to proble

Absolutely, and this sort of thing happens in large companies as well. Software engineers are great at providing “well, why don’t you just..” answers to problems they don’t actually have their brains wrapped around. This often leads to attempts to scale poorly scaling approaches (e.g., we’ll just bake every variant, since there are only four today - which becomes combinatorially intractable after a few years of development). On the flip side, software engineers are also great at choosing how they’re going to solve a problem before they really have a handle on what they’re going to solve. I use this maybe 5-10 times per year (and several engineers I work with have taken to repeating it): “tell me what you’re doing but, more importantly, tell me what you’re not doing.” Forcing people to be explicit about what is not in scope helps to bring clarity to otherwise murky tangles of ambiguity.