Hah, yes. I will say that while I understand the general disdain here, as I grew more senior in my career I realized the world takes all types. There are "doers" who will rush to an end goal that's highly prioritized and then there's "optimizers" who come fix that mess up into a durable, cost-effective system. Some people are gifted enough in knowledge and have the right business priority to do both at the same time, but usually they're required at different times.

Anecdotally, optimization tasks (in this brain) are multitudes easier than innovation tasks. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to do things differently whereas optimization utilizes many lessons I've learned over and over again with well-trodden patterns. That's to say, I'm grateful for the doers :)

These roles aren't opposed at all, they greatly benefit each other :-)

Bringing what used to be the privilege of upper management (wasting massive amounts of resources while getting paid handsomely) down to software developers.

It's that trickle-down effect people talked about, right?

It's a beautiful symbiosis.

"We need this to scale to hundreds of millions of users across many regions"

"But we have no users at all right now"

"But we might have hundreds of millions of users in future"

"You are being negative, the system is great, we don't like that kind of attitude here".

I've typically worked in SRE and platform engineering work and that's where I've gotten exposed to these kinds of Rube Goldberg machines. Make a short list of them when you find them and then use them as a hit list during "cost cutting". Most people don't want to touch these systems because they look big and expansive and generally "work". They're just very poorly optimized.

Dare I say, any time I see a function as a service my brain immediately drifts to inspecting the cost implications of said process.

IT departments, typically, though occasionally there are whole companies that work in "technology" where this type of work can be found.

I said the above as a jest, but seriously, simplification of complex stacks has been a good consulting gig.

Most large companies. There is a stark difference between the distinguished engineers and the tier below them in terms of asking people to stop doing things badly.

That is what skunkworks are for. You just deliver on time and you are fine.