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IMO, technical leadership isn’t allowed to build at scale or the leadership doesn’t exist. The race to the bottom incentivises profit over principle. Boards do
by adreamingsoul 6y ago
IMO, technical leadership isn’t allowed to build at scale or the leadership doesn’t exist.
The race to the bottom incentivises profit over principle. Boards don’t care if something is built to scale if the competitor gets to market with a cheaper solution. Scaling is a day two problem.
I’m bearish on my future employment as someone who questions the motivations for profit driven development.
I naively thought the market would reward the best product, instead I see the cheapest product being rewarded. What happened to innovation and doing what’s best for society?
- yoz-y 6y agoYou answered the question yourself. Cost is by far the most important factor, so if you focus on quality you will not be able to sell your product.
- qznc 6y agoAs long as our resources are limited we always need to consider the tradeoffs. This is not specific to software.
- benrbray 6y agoI think it's fairly common for even established companies to prioritize short-term costs over long-term costs, even when the long-term costs of NOT investing in good tooling are astronomical. So absolute cost isn't really the deciding factor.
- noir_lord 6y ago> reward the best product, instead I see the cheapest product being rewarded. That's because you are looking at best from one angle and the market from another. To the "market" the best may well be the cheapest thing that mostly does it's job/most of the time. When I was young I used to think users cared about bugs and they do but they only care when the bugs are sufficient in number and degree to cross a threshold where they outweigh the utility of the software, That sort of 1 in 100 times it loses an hours work, well if the 99 times it saves me an hours work, shrug. What we (as techies and I'm generalising wildly here) want to build is heirloom quality carpentry, what we get to actually build is franken-furniture from ikea packs that we hope has some some instructions and won't fall apart next week.