We as software developers don’t just get to sit back and blame the money people. We are incredibly incredibly incredibly guilty of piling on shitty features nobody wants because ‘we got that far down the backlog’, don’t want to move on to doing something else, and don’t know when to call it quits.
well, it's because they're separate groups is the problem. The money people don't pay the programmers to sit around and do nothing. so the programmers keep writing more code. if they could just say nope, it's finished, it's done, and step away, and keep getting the paycheck, they wouldn't have to find reasons to keep programming.
Grey area: Product managers/owners prioritize the backlog. Engineering has final say on what stories/issues they pull from that backlog based on their deeper knowledge of technical dependencies and similar phenomena.
