These criticisms about engineering PR are too heavy handed. Great engineers solve problems and describe problems without finger pointing to place blame. In fact I think that the worst engineers I’ve worked with are the ones most often reaching for someone to place it on.
Saying yes tends to make people a lot more psychologically dependent on you. It is very easy to get inside of someone’s head doing this. Each person sees you differently but it’s much easier to divide and conquer the group like this. The crowd will part and on each side will be a group: One will see you as a dependable colleague and the other as that person who is stealing the thunder of the no crowd. It helps that by saying yes often, people bring more problems to you, and you start to become very attuned to who is working on what, and how each problem intersects with your work. This is like seeing the stars through the James Webb versus seeing them from a hand held telescope. And intuitively, this leads to less opportunities to say yes for the people who often say no. When this happens to the no group, it is like driving the deepest wedge of anger into that crowd. It is like starving a village and watching them perish in the plains while sitting at the top of a hill overlooking. They will fight with you and amongst themselves. For the other group, nothing changes and you are still their friend, they will always say nice things to you and bring you valuable problems to solve.
Give it a try some time. It’s a lot of fun. You can’t make a career out of saying no. But you can probably stay at the same place doing the same work for 10 years. If that’s your thing.
I think runtime checks like this using environment variables is great however what has burned me in the past is that when debugging problems, not knowing what happened at runtime when the logs were produced was problematic. So when test protected environments environment variable needed to be updated I might have a hard time back tracking to it
