Yea, I don't see the complaint here. It's part of my job to let whomever the client may be that what they're doing may be a bad use of resources (typically in a documented email in a very positive tone with lots of "decision makers" on the email, also with a nice lead in explanation as to a way it could be efficient under some set of circumstances so they can copy paste that as their "well we weren't sure" pathway forward).

After that, I really really don't care anymore, that's someone else's problem. I've played that soapbox and it's a waste of my time and energy. I make sure responsibility is passed back, documented and proceed. If you want to throw hundreds of thousands or millions at me and whomever to some wasteful request, go for it. You have the option, you've been warned, and I've given you a valid excuse to proceed with high risk, high uncertainty of ROI option with everyone important involved.

I do a lot of contractual/consulting work so even warning can mean early termination of work forward, so I'm taking a risk even informing you (some people actually listen and work stops early during consulting time and development follow up never occurs, these are the smart people and they're bad for my livelihood)--I could just do whatever you ask and get paid. If I were salaried, there's even less risk of me losing income forward by informing so I say in those cases just do your professional due diligence go let people know it's a bad idea without creating political land mines for anyone, then allow them to step on land mines at their own discretion.

There are other factors at work that may exist outside of the "1h of labor saved" too.

It could be something that's tricky. While the optimal case is 1h of work, if something goes wrong then its doing forensic auditing on the books in 3 months and spending lots of time there.

It could be something that needs to be repeatable. Yes, it's 1h, but before this was done Alice did it and before that Bob did it. They did it slightly differently and that cause problems. Having a computer program do it provides change management to the process of doing that task.

It could be something that needs auditing. Tying into the previous two, having a "this is how it's done and all the calculations that go into it along with a test suite" makes it easier to be assured that it is working correctly.

There are lots of things outside of the purview of a developer working on doing whatever task needs to be done to solve a problem. The value of the problem being solved is the issue of the manager or the customer.

> in a private company, they're the ones writing the checks

As long as they're being otherwise reasonable, I don't have a problem doing something that doesn't seem terribly "important" to me either. However, in my career I've had many frustrating instances where they were demanding something in a timeframe that I couldn't deliver it without ensuring that there wouldn't be any unintended side effects - and then blaming me for the side effects when they came up. I only push back when they don't realize how complex what they're asking for is. Of course, then they play the "tell me how long it's going to take so I can argue with you until you agree that it will take as long as I originally asked for" game.

> they were demanding something in a timeframe that I couldn't deliver it without ensuring that there wouldn't be any unintended side effects - and then blaming me for the side effects when they came up.

Far too few developers understand: just because the people writing the checks ask you to do it and you implemented it exact as they ordered you to doesn't mean the people writing the checks will take responsibility for the resulting bad situations that can lead to them not writing you checks anymore. If anything, you'll be used as a scapegoat to prevent them from not getting any more checks written.

Of course you have the option of saying "no" unless the company culture / leadership climate does not allow it. That's far from the inherent obligation you're describing.

I do however agree with leaving any organization that does not allow you to express disagreement.

I think that depends on whether "no" means a nice way of saying "this is stupid" - which I agree with, and have done before, to mixed results - vs. outright refusing to do work that's been requested. I don't think an employee who is being paid a wage by an employer has the right to refuse to do something just because it's a stupid idea.

I'd much rather have an employee who will refuse to do work that is stupid than one who will do whatever is asked of them. Especially if it's something as bad as the GP example of six months of dev work to save one person-hour per year.

This is really only true of it's coming from the very top of the food chain. Sales is obviously an important part of the revenue stream, but it's not the only part and it doesn't automatically trump all other concerns. For example, it's not useful to sell a product that doesn't work, will cause huge customer churn and will destroy the company's reputation. If you're a shareholder or care about the longevity of your job, it's important to push back on wasteful behavior.

Absolutely agreed, I implied with "writing the checks" it was the actual owner(s) of the business making the decision but could have been more explicit about it.

Completely agree on that.

Now imagine a government entity where the users and the dev are both paid by the gov.