Is there any big (or even medium-sized) company where this isn't true? I feel like it's just a rule of corporate culture that flashy overpromising projects get you promoted and regularly doing important but mundane and hard-to-measure things gets you PIP'd.
At another job, at a financial firm I got a big bonus after I went live on November 28th with an upgrade that let a system 10x their max throughput, and scaled linearly instead of being completely stuck. at their 1x. Median number of requests per second received in dec 1st? 1.8x... the system would have failed under load, causing significant losses to the company.
Prevention is underrated, but firefighting heroics are so well regarded that sometimes it might even be worthwhile to be the arsonist
So I wonder: do the same dynamics appear in any non-software companies? If not, why not? If yes, have they already found a way to solve them?
A long history of blood, lawsuits, and regulations.
Preventing a building from collapsing is done ahead of time, because buildings have previously collapsed, and cost a lot of lives / money etc.
Engineers are also generally encultured into a professional culture that emphasizes disciplined engineering practices and technical excellence. On the other hand, modern software development culture actively discourages these traits. For example, taking the time to do design is labeled as "waterfall", YAGNI sentiment, opposition to algorithms interviews, opposition to "complicated" functional programming techniques, etc.
A huge number of roles casually use the "engineer" moniker and a lot of people who actually have engineering degrees of some sort, even advanced degrees from top schools, are not licensed and don't necessarily follow rigid processes (e.g. structural analyses) on a day to day basis.
As someone who does have engineering degrees outside of software, I have zero problem with the software engineer term--at least for anyone who does have some education in basic principles and practices.
Of which the Sydney Opera House is one of the better known examples.
Original developer is long gone. Me and another guy are two of the only people (we aren't a tech company) who can re-learn Perl, upgrade multiple versions of Linux/Apache/MySQL, make everything else work like Kerberos etc...
Or maybe I'm one of the only people dumb enough to take it on.
Either way, nobody will get so much as an attaboy at the next department meeting. But, they'll know who to go to the next time some other project is resurrected from the depths of hell and needs to be brought up to date.
Consultancies are by far the worst, a project is done and everyone moves on, yet the clients still expect quick fixes and the occasional added feature but there's no one familiar with the code base.
Developers don't help either, a lot move from green field to green field like locusts and never learn the lessons of maintaining something, so they make the same mistakes over and over again.
If anything, big companies are better about tech-debt squashing, and it's the little tiny companies and startups that are, on average, spending less time on it.
I will preemptively agree that this isn’t possible everywhere; but if you create a good work environment where people don’t feel like puppets executing the PM’s vision, they might actually care and want to do a solid day’s work (which we’re wired for).
It’s very rare, this is one of the only places I can imagine something like that happening.
Eventually things get so bad that there's no choice but to abandon feature work to fix them.
The business loses out multiple times. Feature work slows down as developers are forced to waste time finding workarounds for debt and bugs. The improvements/fixes take more time than they would have due to layers of crap being piled on top, and the event that forces a clean up generally has financial or reputational consequence.
Collaborative decision making is the only way around this. Most engineers understand that improvements must be balanced with feature work.
I find it very strange that the industry operates in the way it does. Where the people with the most knowledge of the requirements and repercussions are so often stripped of any decision making power.
I won't say procrastination is a virtue. But sometimes the deferred task really does cease to matter.
Valve?