This entire comment reads as someone who has a purely adversarial relationship with their coworkers with little trust. Sounds exhausting!
Of course it may not apply to software today (except to the extent first impressions count) because modern software tends to be continuously maintained (and modern games often are too, to a much lesser degree, with post-release patches).
[0] Games like Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Terraria and online games being a minority.
The profit-maximizing strategy is to keep the level of crappiness that frustrates your customers, but not enough to make them switch to a competing product.
Or Duke Ellington: "I don't need time. What I need is a deadline."
Bad forever!
And yeah, no googling involved. I often look in HN profiles to find more context to why people are writing what they write. I don’t stalk them, tbh I find it creepy when people from HN find me on X and DM me.
The better places I've worked were more focused on compromise, experimentation and taking shared responsibility for risk.
to me he's right about how devs should deliver it as engineeringly sound as possible, and executives should deliver it as timely as possible.
its a balance between having a usable product and a product they need at the right time.
it's not adversarial. its a conflict yes, but a healthy one.
Swe should inform about consequences, and executives should inform about business priorities, but they don't have to all disagree on the way forwards.
And since we are that and are paid for that knowledge, we should strive to improve software / system quality as much as possible. Isn't the job of executives, managers, etc. to figure out the constraints we have and strive to improve profit and shipping speed as much as possible?
Together, with our combined expertise we can get the practical best of all three. But if eng just nod along knowing they are sacrificing quality, security, scalability, etc. then they are doing a disservice to the team, no?
It's the executives' job to synthesize info from other orgs and understand the business. In social media apps for example, delaying a feature launch for better quality may not be worth it. In commercial aeronautics software, it matters a lot better.
Oh nooo... the poor managers, how will they manage if you don't TRUST them blindly and completely (and bend over backwards to fulfill all their whims)? What kind of a cult is this? I'm not a sheep that needs to be herded. Besides, trust is earned.
So no, it's not exhausting, it's the exact opposite. It's refreshing and freeing.
Anyways, I get along with my coworkers very well. In fact most of my friends began as my coworkers. Then again I do not consider managers to be my coworkers. And generally speaking, yes, you could say I don't trust them. But that just comes from working in 5 for-profit companies for over 15 years. The only exception was an energy company, probably because the "just ship it" mentality wasn't as strong.
That said it was quite a cynical interpretation of my comment and aggressive reply, so I'll leave it with that.