> convincing people

I thought you didn't want to be burdened with selling ideas, but just wanted authority to implement them without convincing people.

“Selling ideas” is not related at all to demonstrating the technical merit of ideas. They are completely unrelated things.

It might be just me but I think a lot of people read "Selling ideas" as "demonstrating the technical merit of ideas".

Unless the requirements are brain-dead simple, you'll need to sell at the very least the criteria on which you're measuring technical merit: is a latency number a hard requirement, will it scale for x of years, will it be buildable in y months or years.

At least some of that is going to come to convincing someone you've done your homework even if they couldn't make a better decision right?

That's an odd distinction and almost certainly not one that was made by anyone else in this conversation.

I disagree. It is a basic and ubiquitous distinction in any corporation, because the distinction between appraising the technical merit of a proposal and assessing the political implications, who gets credit, bonuses, etc. etc. is so vast.

The connotation of “selling your vision/plan” is obviously political, getting buy-in from a political / authority sense, unrelated to any technical specifics.

This is just corporate day-to-day 101 stuff. My use of this distinction is not unique in any way, it is the obvious interpretation that would be used anywhere someone is discussing any type of business project.