The reason that European tech sucks is that people in Europe are open to such arguments. If an engineer in the US started talking about SHOULD vs MUST, some PM would just give them that "what the fuck did I just listen to" face, spend the next few minutes gently trying to convince them that the customer experience matters more than the spec, and if they fail, escalate and get the decision they want.

For example, why does Google handle this differently for consumer and enterprise accounts? Well it's Google so the answer could always just be "they are disorganized" but there's a good chance that in both cases, it was the pragmatic choice given the slightly different priorities of these types of customers.

Not my PM (in the US). My PM would try to avoid anything that is not absolutely necessary and therefore ask developers not to develop anything that isn't a MUST. I know that we like making fun of Europe for their alleged lack of innovation but this isn't a Europe thing.

Well the current US Administration would agree - the law doesn't matter, we need to be "pragmatic" and do what we think is right. Rules be damned.

Once you deviate a bit from the standard, you're down a slippery slope. Its not that difficult to use pragmatism to justify wrongdoing.

Do bugs and bad implementations not exist in US software? If an US company did this, nobody would be bloviating about how it is a cultural issue or whatever.

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