I work at a tech startup, and part of my job is to talk to job candidates and answer their questions about the company. One of the questions I often get asked is, "How do prioritization decisions get made? Who decides what should be worked on and what shouldn't be?...
You're precisely right - I've asked it myself in order to see if the company operates in a reasonable manner or not :)
Your second point is spot on as well - it mostly comes from more junior candidates (which, numerically, is the bulk of the people we hire), and from the follow-ups I get, it does often seem to be asked in earnest from that population.
I work at a tech startup, and part of my job is to talk to job candidates and answer their questions about the company. One of the questions I often get asked is, "How do prioritization decisions get made? Who decides what should be worked on and what shouldn't be? How are the goals of the company determined?"
On the one hand, this question is eminently reasonable - people's work has to be assigned somehow or other, and it's natural to be curious how that happens.
However, I always get a bit frustrated when trying to answer it, because I know that it is really not the right question to be asking. It's based... (read 1033 more words →)
You're right - the reason they review it at all is to retain the power to reject unreasonable proposals (and sometimes to make slight tweaks based on information only they possess). Sometimes they make the goals more ambitious, too.
90% of the time, though (and 100% of the time in my company's short existence), the proposals coming from below are almost exactly what they wanted - the communication outside of strategic planning exercises is sufficient to ensure that.