Comment by khazhoux

> Had you let Carmack talk to the lead engineer for about fifteen minutes, I'm sure he would've come around entirely for objective reasons

I wish this were true. Yet I've been so many projects around me go months and even years down some very-clearly wrong direction, because the engineering lead refuses to course correct. Typical patterns are:

- The system design attempts to address "future" issues, making it two orders of magnitude more complex than necessary.

- The eng lead wants to "get it right from the beginning." So months later, you have a beautiful CI pipeline, coding standards, base classes, etc, and still no usable prototype.

- Trying to solve all possible use cases, with one system.

- The above, but then focusing on just one use case so narrowly, the rest have to be crammed in.

I could keep going. These are cases when you need a decisive (and technically sharp) manager above to call bullshit and rip the bandaid if necessary.