Bullshit and it’s right there in your comment: devs are not the only ones capable of assessing difficulty. The entire team should be doing that COLLABORATIVELY well before any dev touches a keyboard. Code isn’t some arcane black magic and we’ve all built products before, heard these excuses before… so stop saying “that’s not your job, that’s not my job”. Not a good look.

Suddenly declaring something is too hard and ignoring specs during the build phase is not a part of any dev’s fucking job, though you’d be surprised by the way they act.

Which is encapsulated perfectly in your comment. You mention it’s someone else’s job to handle business direction problems while ignoring how the problem is actually the dev not doing their job to begin with. The product meets its goals by showing three points of data, but a dev said fuck it and only showed one. That’s not a business issue, it’s a “I don’t want to” problem. Just like in your comment, any issues with “business direction” did not exist until you cited it to cover up for not doing the work that was already planned.

It’s not scapegoating to point out actual behavior. Behavior I’ve seen for 15 years and behavior you reinforced with your comment. You completely ignore the role of collaboration. It’s insulting to have a dev define your job in order for them to justify making decisions in a vacuum.

It’s especially maddening to hear this after I’ve spent over a year working directly with the CEO and CPO on a new product, lead focus groups, spoken with 100’s users on the issue, designed prototyped and validated solutions with additional testing… all alongside dev leads to expose any concerns early on. The board is happy, the c-suite is happy, the users like it, and we’re all set except some jackass developer thinks that since they know C# no one else can weigh in on all of their reasons to just not build what the TEAM designed.