I sent them [= the Application Architecture group] a copy of my spec and went
to meet them, in case they had something interesting to say.

“Blah blah!" said one of them. "Blah blah blah, blah blah blah!” said
another. I don't think they quite had anything interesting to say. They were
very enamored of the idea of subclassing and sort of thought that people
making macros in Excel wanted to subclass a lot of things. In any case, one
of the fellows said, "Well, this is all very interesting. What's next? Who
has to approve your spec?"

I laughed. Even though I had only been at Microsoft for a few months, I knew
that there was no such thing as somebody approving my spec. Hell, nobody had
time to read my spec, let alone approve it. The programmers were bugging me
every day to get them more pages so that they could write more code. My boss
(and his boss) made it very clear to me that nobody else understood macros
or had time to work on macros, so whatever I did, it better be right. And
here this PhD working in a strange research group at Microsoft assumed that
things were a bit more formal than that.

Joel Spolsky, "Two Stories"
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/TwoStories.html