alt Hacker NewsThat’s not how software engineering works. Management doesn’t know what a feature will cost to add so they defer to engineers who produce estimates which are used to forecast and plan. Engineers estimate based on their own preferences (whether for cynical self-serving reasons or not). You estimate a feature will be delivered in 2 months but it takes 4, that’s 4 months of pressure you could have avoided by rejecting the feature.
Some features are annoying to work on, some have long term implications for how much and what type of work will need to be done. Some just don’t fit with what the engineers want to work on. I know which features are going to take endless stakeholder meetings and which aren’t. I know which are going to require overtime and being on-call. I know which are going to kill off my pet project.
The most self-serving action a software engineer who doesn’t want to work more than the bare minimum can take is to reject as much as possible as being too difficult or bad or some other excuse.
I don't know in what type of environments you've worked, but "rejecting a feature" and "managers blindly deferring to engineering estimates" are very alien concepts to me, and I'm pretty sure to most people out there.
What usually happens in my experience is that management comes up with some new requirements that they may or may not have already sold to a customer on a more or less specific timeline. They then ask for an estimate on when that will be implemented in the product.
If the estimate doesn't conform to their expected timeline, they typically challenge it vehemently. If you can convince them that it's a realistic estimate for what they're asking, they then start discussing ways to reduce the scope while still delivering more or less the same feature. If you can't, then it will end up at "you're being pessimistic, let's start and we'll pull through", which will later turn into "we'll have to work this Saturday because we're way behind on what we committed on that feature".
Sometimes, a very well respected engineer will occasionally be able to convince someone in management that a feature is just not worth it. But that is the rarest case I've seen, and it will definitely not happen if some junior or middle engineer tries to invent some generic excuse.