RFCs are written and discussed, but there’s no mechanism by which they’re formally adopted or rejected. Organizations choose to implement them (or don’t); they become standards through widespread voluntary adoption.

This means that, if engineering organizations naively adopt an RFC process without bolting on some sort of explicit decision-making step, the process quickly breaks down. Without some sort of process to move towards a decision, the default outcome of an RFC is “no”

The team operating an RFC process inside a company must bolt on their own decision-making process. Usually, that’s via authority.

This is also why I personally stray away from a true RFC process at work - it’s built for decentralization and long time-scales, while a corporate setting is tightly centralized and biased to speed.


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www.joshbeckman.org/notes/638704761