But 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

But 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.