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Comment by vmurthy | Hacker News Reader

Perfecto! As a programmer turned product manager, I see this first hand every single day. The end user doesn’t care what technology you use as long as it solves their problem(s). My managers don’t care what technology my team uses as long as timelines and budgets are met. I’m astonished and sometimes smile at how my old programmer self wouldn’t understand this basic fact.

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You're right that the end user doesn't care about what technology you use, but do they care about things not working? Do they care that a new feature takes 3 months to develop when it could have taken 1 month if the code had been better architected?

Its funny to see management types dismiss the programmers as being "airy-fairy" when they talk about things like code quality and technology stacks but then they wonder why things get completed on time, why bugs happen, why sites get hacked etc.

Somebody else has mentioned this analogy before in this thread, but if you had a house built would you say the same thing about the structural integrity? "As long as the floor can support me then thats all that matters", "House dwellers don't care what kind of structural beams are used to support the floor they just want it to not collapse". That kind of a mentality is ok for an average person living in a house but you'd you have to be off your rocker to hire a building manager who said that.

My bad if I gave you the wrong impression about management types. You're right that things should work. What I meant was this: assume you have technology stack A and B each with its own pros and cons (whether tech maturity, programmer skills or what have you). Then, higher management expects the lead programmer/engineering manager to review the pros and cons and take the decision and deliver keeping the end user in mind. Whether stack A has xyz features which will do blah-blah-blah to the team is less relevant than the deliverable. Hope it is clear :-)

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