IMO most engineers completely forget or don't appreciate the importance of optics, especially when working with non-technical founders or management.
If it doesn't need to work, then it doesn't matter and the optics also don't matter. Of course, it might be more important for your promotion that the optics are correct, no matter what the ground reality is, and the crash could come down on someone else's head instead of yours, but in this scenario someone who is against a culture of optics rather has a point.
If you shipped and nobody important enough knows, then you haven't shipped in the eyes of the most important people.
I'm the first person to agree with you that it sucks that optics are important. But they are. You can definitely ship shit with great optics and get a promotion and be far away before that shit hits the fan.
But if you ship the greatest thing since sliced bread and nobody notices, then you might as well not have shipped at all.
The point is that your impact isn’t defined by a McKinsey trained head of HR who gamified a career ladder for you, or the opinion of “important people”. In fact, what impact means depends on where and (crucially) when you measure it.
Some professions have longer reward cycles than a human lifetime. Great writers, artists and thinkers are often recognized posthumously. Doesn’t mean everyone should write poems, but we shouldn’t exacerbate a culture where you’re useless if you can’t charm your closest mediocre middle manager. Life is more.
It's still important unfortunately.
Your promotion at Enron still has meaning today because it bumped you up the career ladder early on in your career and your next job after that was a step up from that etc. 20 years of elevated salary because you climbed the career ladder early adds up to real dollars in your investment accounts.
Do I like it? Absolutely not and I am trying to stay at the level I'm at right now for as long as I possibly can, because my job is not entirely a popularity contest and still has real good software engineering and actually building software that real people use and love in it. If I "climbed" any further all day every day would be a popularity contest. But I do recognize that being allowed to continue building that software requires (as in "it's important") to take part in some of these popularity contests.
(talking paid work wise here - if you're OK to live in a basement doing meaningful open source work that will outlive you for the rest of your life and it makes you happy, then power to you - not most people's reality)
1. To be grateful for something.
2. To fully understand something.
3. To increase in value
I’m sure there are more.
I read this as option 2.
For me there's a huge gap between 1 and 2 so it might cause misunderstandings when used in a sentence. I despise a lot of things I fully understand and if I said I "appreciate" them - sounds weird.
Case 1: If it's something useful (e.g. 'your help', 'what you did') then it's more likely about being thankful.
This use of 'appreciate' is also a social action. You say it to make someone feel good for helping.
Case 2: If it's an abstract thing (e.g. 'the importance of', 'the difficulty of') then it's more likely you're talking about understanding.
Usually when you talk about this usage it's because the _fact_ of understanding is important to the speech act. If someone explains the law of gravity you don't say "I appreciate that", you say "I understand that". But if you fell from a height and hurt yourself you can say "I didn't appreciate the law of gravity".
Case 3: If it's intransitive and it's about money ('the car appreciated in value', 'the house appreciated in value').
Finding people that can explain these types of examples to new language learners can be quite difficult, even on language focused platforms/forums.
Optics is subjective and often superficial, a performative illusion for the sake of whoever is looking at you. But that doesn't mean it's not valuable or useful in a social context.
Here, I read the word "appreciate" to mean, to recognize the value of a thing even if you disagree with it.
For example, someone could be a pacifist and still appreciate the need for weapons for national defense. They may not agree with the means but still admit it has value and effect.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/89/b2/2b/89b22b4b18dd3ed630a0...
Maybe the problem isn’t the engineers, but the need for optics…
Which can be more rewarding to satisfy than the optics of just management. But still needs to be managed appropriately.