5 ms·
Why do you think they are prevalent and successful?
by confounded 9y ago
Why do you think they are prevalent and successful?
- TeMPOraL 9y agoBecause the market doesn't reward useful, quality work as much as it rewards throwing crap together and investing in marketing.
- confounded 9y agoBut do we mean quality and usefulness as technical attributes of a program's construction at a point in time? Or as beliefs of a customer about a product, or a company? The skills to get to the latter are often different to the first, and both are expected in many modern software engineers. The later is much more about iteration, experimentation, empathy, and judgement. It's not worth polishing areas of a system which you anticipate abandoning based on the results of an A/B test. Writing it and abandoning some meh code can still be the best engineered choice in a product development process. The engineering of the development process matters more than the program. I'd argue that success in modern software engineering (at least in Silicon Valley) is at least as dependent on understanding social processes, as it is on computational ones.
- analog31 9y agoOddly enough I think there's an analogy in mainstream engineering. If you build a supermarket, it has to be engineered for safety. But the engineers are not responsible for whether the mall serves a purpose, such as selling products for money.
- eeZah7Ux 9y agoBecause the market is still paying for software licenses instead of paying for services. It rewards writing as much code as possible to sell it. And then deprecate it and write more and more.