> It’s not always vital to the business to have a good code base.
Many engineers may cringe at this... but this is true. Code is only as good as it is able to fulfill a business need: that is help the organization meet its strategic goals.
Technical constraints - maintainability, security, performance,... - are really subservient to that principle.
That is, they aren't unimportant. Rather, their importance is relevant - or a priority - in so far that they help achieve the higher goals.
... but this isn't a universal maxim!
> Also, for better or worse, if an engineer is not of the variety I listed above, they are replaceable in the eyes of the business.
An employer/employee relationship is very much a business deal between humans. An employee sells expertise and potential for a fixed amount of time in exchange for a fixed salary. As with any deal, such business relationships extend beyond simple monetary compensation. Especially because employees subjugate themselves to the authority of their employer, making it inherently a skewed relationship.
When humans invest their time and effort in a venture, they hope to get a due sense of satisfaction and self-actualization from doing so. That's where aligning values makes all the difference.
What many business people fail to see is that employees don't identify themselves as resources, liabilities or labor. They see themselves as partners who hope to make a meaningful contribution, and they are willing to do so provided that they are treated as such: with a due sense of empathy and respect for their opinions, what motivates them to come to work each day; and so on.
If they don't get that, two things might happen. Either employees will walk out rather quickly, or - worst - they stay and will only give you the bare minimum of their efforts - living for the weekends - wasting both their own and your time.
It's true that companies aren't obligated to keep employees forever or that they can be let go if both parties want different things ...
... but publicly stating that any employer/employee relationship is "replaceable" without that nuance, is the shortest route towards foundering any hopes to attract potential hires who care about your business at all.
> They don’t complain about business constraints and they put out stellar work.
Given the above, humans will also factor in the moral and ethical side of what they are doing. And they can, will and should criticize those business constraints if those don't align with what they feel is "good" or "morally sound".
Business constraints aren't just limited to implementing some weird feature. That's just the output of a business constraint. Neither are styling rules or automated tests business constraints. Nope. it's far more then that. It's workplace culture as a whole. It's the shared values that are espoused on a day-to-day basis by everyone.
It's normal to have some level of conflict or tension as the net result is an ever-moving compromise.
Expecting that employees will never complain and only put out stellar work pretty much makes any healthy discussion moot. It's a non-argument as "stellar" is only meaningful in the eye of the beholder. All it does is create the perception that employees are seen as automatons.
Again, when employees pick up on this; they will either walk out or - worst - stick around and waste yours and their own time only doing the bare minimum to cash a paycheck.
In the short run, the bottom line of a company may reflect the financial benefits of optimizing for efficiency. But in the long run; not taking the human factor into account isn't sustainable at all. Neither for the employees, nor the business owners.