You know how it goes. You have an idea. A good one. You can see the architecture in your head. You know what the MVP looks like, you know what stack to use, you can feel the momentum building. So you do the responsible thing — you get buy-in. You schedule the meetings. You align with your manager. You loop in the product owner. You present to the architects. You get the nod. Green light. Let's go. And then, four weeks in, someone you've never heard of shows up in a meeting and says, "Wait, has anyone talked to compliance about this?" And just like that, you're back to square one.
I've lost count of how many times this has happened. You think you've got all the stakeholders accounted for. You've done your due diligence. You've had the conversations. And then one more person crawls out of the woodwork — someone from legal, someone from security, someone from a team three org charts away who apparently has veto power over a button color — and the entire project gets derailed. Not killed, mind you. Derailed. Which is worse, because now you're stuck in limbo. You can't move forward, you can't kill it cleanly, and you're spending all your energy re-justifying something that everyone already agreed was a good idea. The momentum is gone. The energy is gone. And the thing that was going to take six weeks is now a "Q3 initiative" which is corporate speak for "it's dead but we don't want to say that out loud."
This is why I build on the side. Not because I don't respect process — I do. I've been in enterprise long enough to understand why governance exists. But there's a difference between healthy process and permission culture. Healthy process catches real risks early. Permission culture turns every builder into a politician. You stop writing code and start writing decks. You stop shipping features and start scheduling alignment sessions. You start optimizing for consensus instead of outcomes, and consensus is where good ideas go to get sanded down into something nobody's excited about but everyone can "live with." That's not building. That's theater.
The side projects I work on at night and on weekends don't have this problem. Nobody needs to approve my architecture. Nobody from a team I've never met is going to pop up and ask if I've considered their use case. I decide, I build, I ship. If it's wrong, I fix it. If it's bad, I learn. The feedback loop is hours, not quarters. And here's what I've noticed: the things I build without permission are almost always better than the things I build with a dozen approvals. Not because I'm smarter at night — because I'm faster. Because speed is its own kind of intelligence. When you can iterate in real time, you make better decisions. When you're waiting three weeks for a stakeholder review, you're not iterating — you're decaying. So if you're a builder and you're stuck in the approval loop, my honest advice is this: stop waiting. Go build the thing on your own time, in your own space, with your own rules. The worst that happens is you learn something. The best that happens is you build something real while everyone else is still scheduling the kickoff meeting.