> I think it's overly reductive to say that the only purpose a company has is to make money. Yes, but also no. It's a simplification that is amazingly accurate

> I think it's overly reductive to say that the only purpose a company has is to make money. Yes, but also no. It's a simplification that is amazingly accurate, it does help to think of different companies as thinking about money on shorter or longer timespans. As someone working in big tech, I have to say that for certain features I would much rather ship the right 10,000 lines in 6 months than 100,000 lines of the kind of wrong thing. The cost of being even a little wrong at the scale my company operates at is eye-watering. We had two teams do a bit of what you describe over the course of six months, shipped a lot without building much alignment. We are going to live with the cost of those decisions for a minimum of 5 years. The lower bound of the cost of working around their mistakes right now is equivalent to... 80 engineer years maybe? Because now we have customers who rely on some insane functionality they built that we are contractually obligated to support (and spiritually want to maintain good faith) and it will infect a bunch of other systems that will now have to integrate with their choices and take on that tech debt.