I've seen a lot of engineers be negative in a destructive way. They tear down ideas, but fail to offer solutions. Usually this is about their ego rather than a desire to help the team.

I agree that's a dark pattern and something I hope I have never been (I realize you weren't accusing me of that).

I try to ask questions like, "What happens when X goes down?" What happens when network latency goes up?

I quit a job over this one. I had designed an API for a consumer IP/IR control type thing. You say, "I want to tell that thing over there to turn on." The API does the thing, and then exits. The API does retain state-- but only in as much as it wakes up when it gets a packet from a device, parses it, etc, and makes any internal state changes.

Well, management decided they wanted to demo it running continuously for days at CES. Now if you've never done a demo for CES-- it is the worst environment possible. Networks go up and down, there is so much radio traffic that WiFi, BT, anything are unreliable.

I told them I would need to harden the API, that it wasn't designed for that scenario and most of our tests didn't last more then a few seconds keep in mind that at this time, this was a skunk works sort of thing that had not yet been productized. Also, keep in mind there was an aggressive, aggressive development schedule.

They predictably lost their minds. I know its crazy right? Test for the exact scenario you plan to show to customers? They forbade me for doing any sort of test like that and charged ahead with the demo. A month later a manager dressed me down in front of my entire team. About the bug that they had forbade me to fix.

I walked out and never went back.

EDIT: That turned out to be more of a story about ruthless management and constructive dismissal.

My approach was to allocate 2 weeks for even the most basic things because unknowns always creep in and a tighter schedule tends to make those things creep in even more. Also, many of the requests had no particular urgency to begin with.