A long time ago, the worst project manager I ever worked with tried to get involved in a technical decision around database choice.
See, he had a set of demands that he told us were absolute requirements and in his eye this data store solved those problems neatly.
Except.
We talked to the people who worked on said database and we were not just a little outside of the parameters where they made such guarantees, we were way outside of what they were built for.
We tried to push back and get him to help solve the constraint problem, but he refused to even define the constraint problem for us.
For instance, we were told that we needed to use a data source that had a 15 minute delay. The PM wanted us to have < 1 minute resolution.
We were going "you can fight with eng management who told us to use the 15 minute data source, and you would need to drop the requirements for what it gives us."
But no. He could not figure out why we wouldn't just do it.
@hrefna one of my "favorite" personal experiences around this:
We had a heavily-funded team dead set on having all of:
global (literally) write availability of all data at all times
less than 20ms latency at all times
always available
strict serializable consistency
on a Cassandra-backed system
And would absolutely not take "that's impossible", not just "no" as an answer. They just kept pointing to systems that said "yes" and demanding we build the same ability.
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