So someone from another team in the company asked on our public Slack channel if they can send a field they're sending for one client, for all clients, so they don't have to have a branch for that one client that sends it.
We're talking about a string of up to 20 chars, typically much less even connected to each record, of which we have let's say a million per month and each of those records has at least 30 columns, some of them being longer strings even.

A dev from my team responded that they shouldn't send it because, while no one uses it so it's not going to break anything, it will require extra storage.

This was not 20 years ago, this was today, in 2021.

I responded asking what storage does he foresee to be the problem, because I can't see where so I'd like to get more details.

Guess who got ripped to shreds because it's a bad thing to question members of the team in public....

This is just one in a long line of similar brainless idiocies I've had to deal with from this asshole.

And no, I'm not a junior dev or something, I'm transitioning out of the Principal Engineer role for that team (for this reason exactly, otherwise I'd stay as PE). And no, I'm not the transitioning the role to that asshole.

At least 3 people who have left the team because of this asshole.

Managers not helping either, responses like "Yeah, you're right, but you're reasonable, he isn't, so let's appease him until we can find a way to deal with him"...

I used to love being a developer, this asshole made me want to vomit at any mention of anything remotely dev related...

Hope y'all are reasonably happy with your jobs and, more importantly, don't have such an asshole around you!