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This article seems to be conflating two separate matters: making something valuable, and doing something valuable. In a business economics sense, to create val
by jschveibinz 5y ago
This article seems to be conflating two separate matters: making something valuable, and doing something valuable.
In a business economics sense, to create value is to create something that “other people” care about. Engineers create value by meeting customer requirements and doing so at the lowest cost and of sufficient quality. This value is shared between the customer and the business. The customer is satisfied, and the business makes a profit.
Things that are valuable to the engineer such as personal gain, entertainment, skill-building, job satisfaction, resume building, learning new programming languages, work-life balance, etc. are not necessarily part of the economic value equation. These are rather part of the business employment relationship and the way that the job is done. The engineer may be able to share in the economic value in the form of a higher wage or a bonus; but this will only happen if the customer is satisfied first.
tl;dr creating value is an business economics matter, doing something valuable is an personal and/or employment matter.
- smhost 5y agoyou didn't read the article. the author is not making a distinction between intangible value that's useful to the worker vs value that's useful to the customer. they're making a distinction along the axes of intangible/tangible and short/long term, all of which is measured by usefulness to the customer. they're saying to be careful not to destroy long-term intangible value (that's of use to the future customer) in exchange for short term tangible value (also measured by the customer).