> Humans need to be able to overrule anything, anytime.

This needs to be a guiding principle of anyone who builds any sort of software.

This is all well and good if you build your product from the beginning with the vision that it will some day be sold by sales people to huge companies. But if your expectation is that it will always be self service, a bunch of design and engineering work to make it flexible just looks like wasted effort. If you guess wrong in either direction in your early development you'll have problems. Either get to market more slowly because you spent time up front building for a future that may never come, or get to market quickly and deal with the repercussions later.

Yup, this was a lesson I learned the hard way when I built out billing for our SaaS product. I had spent weeks thinking about user accounts, team accounts, subscription, integration with Stripe, how the UI would look, how I would verify VAT numbers for European customers, etc etc etc. In the end I threw all the code away because not a single customer that we had would have used self-checkout billing anyway, everything happens via email, purchase orders, billing portals like Ariba, etc. Monthly subscriptions are far and few between, pay-per-use is something that almost no customer would be interested in. Some customers actually wanted multi-year subscriptions, which Stripe doesn't even support.

It's emails and spreadsheets all the way down if you're building a product for an Enterprise audience.

I agree, but herein lay the rub.

For every exception, you need someone on top of it. You have a limited pool of people to distribute this knowledge to, and the responsibility for maintaining this knowledge to even if that just invoves knowing where to look to figure something out.

Overrides are tricky to accomodate, standardize, and organize if you don't nail dpwn the appropriate data model for the process.

I think this class of issues partly comes from that sales people have much relaxed, politics focused cognition compared to engineers, and are in disregard of non-human entities. They don’t have distinction between MUST or SHALL or SHOULD, everything is MAY or at best RECOMMENDED, and everything you may say or do must be attributed to a person.

So when told there is this thing which must be done by sales that prevents machines doing what that affects customers, it’s interpreted as either an IT guy is making incomprehensibles or hypotheticals because machines cannot be subject of a sentence, and as an empty demand with no return because neither party gains credits from the conversation.

And we’ll end up in “I told you! You had to!” “Told you what? You didn’t say anything”.

And then bunch of naive idealists build system for payments without most important feature - reversibility. Of course, it's used only for speculation and illegal stuff.