Interview Question for Senior Software Engineer at Raytheon:

The analogy is much like what a Formula 1 team deals with. For example within one season the FIA gave teams guidelines about what they can and they can't do. They cut wing off the back of the car and a couple other things that was supposed to have raised lap times by 4 seconds. With those guidelines/restrictions in mind, the team innovated their way around it to not only make up that time, but in some cases go faster than ever.

Same thing for software engineering. You'll often times be presented with constraints that might hold things back and slow you down. Like the F1 engineers, the software engineer has to work with that in delivering a solution. One requirement I had to cope with personally was that anything I did in component A could not drive change into component B even though in my mind changing component B would've been better.