Hacker News Reader

Comment by kingkongjaffa | Hacker News Reader

> Personally, I believe as engineers our focus should be on the product. The profits are the domain of the business people.

This is the dumbest idea in tech. Please don’t listen to this advice. If you’re just starting your career I’m begging you not to laser focus on coding widgets better for the sake of it.

Care about your customers and what problem they are trying to solve and be involved in figuring out how to make solving those problems a profitable endeavour.

All code is throwaway, all code is worthless, solving real needs, wants and pain points for customers is the real source of value.

View on HN

This is as naive as you’re arguing the parent is. I agree you need to care about customers first, and make sure you’re solving their problem, but you absolutely do need to care about the code and if you treat it as always throwaway you can logically get to a justification for vibe coding. Of course you can get far witn these approaches, but they lead to unmaintainable messes which ultimately make it hard or impossible to actually do the thing you want: to deliver customer value.

I'd argue if you care about your customers, vibe coding will be a no-go. Most of us aren't against it not on principle, but because it's just too risky or too inefficient to bring real value in most applications.

If someday it produces messy but actually reliable code my opinion will change, but at this point, it's just too early (not saying it will ever work, but one can hope)

> All code is throwaway,

It could be, but it cost my company a billion dollars over almost 10 years (not exact numbers, but close enough) to rewrite our current product from scratch. If you work on trivial projects you can throw away code at will. However for a lot of projects the cost to rewrite is so high that the business cannot afford to throw away code that works. The business needs new features so they can sell upgrades and make more money. The whole reason they were willing to pay that billion dollars over a decade is the old codebase was bad enough that adding new features became expensive and hard - the rewrite was an investment to make adding more features cheaper in the long run.

Which is why engineering a good product is important. People who make the product technically good pay for themselves in the long run when the business gets an idea. This is very important to business as well.

> If you’re just starting your career I’m begging you not to laser focus on coding widgets better for the sake of it.

How is that focusing on the product?

Focusing on the product means solving problems for your customers, exactly what you said they should be doing

You're both arguing for the same thing

I agree. I'm a bit confused by the response as well. Idk what I need to clarify but I'm open to suggestions.

I was hoping that dichotomy of sacrificing product for profit or profit for product would help but I'm unsure. Multiple people seemed to have misunderstood but I'm also unsure what was confusing. Frankly I'm having a hard time understanding how they reached such a dramatically different interpretation.

Anyone staring your career: maybe start focusing on making money and potentially lots of it from the very beginning. Because unless you are moxie or had an “exit” (he had an exit) you are doing it for the money. Don’t get distracted in the brouhaha of industry-speak and career-speak.

No? I could do several other things if I just wanted money. I do tech work because that is what I am called to do.

Such as?

The business people sure seem to make a lot more money... I can tell you that I have multiple family members that work in sales and make boatloads. My cousin spends at least 15hrs a week playing golf (something he really likes) on the company dime and getting fancy meals. That's also while making over $300k/yr. Others don't play golf but still do the lunches and meals, getting paid similarly. I'd say that this is a much easier work life than what we do...

Certainly you have non-techncal managers that are making more money than you and do you think they do more work? Certainly some do but I doubt all.

That's illegal in my country… you can't pay fancy lunches. If you want the people getting them must declare them in their taxes :D

Really? I live in a country where the tax authorities are very competent. But company representation is still allowed.

Representation ≠ corruption

Exactly. But I suppose this guy were doing the golfing and lunchenoing as a part of representation.

Doesn't explain why the biggest, most profitable tech companies also seem to have the most user-hostile products. I guess maybe the whole "The users and the customers are not the same people" thing...

  > Care about your customers and what problem they are trying to solve and be involved in figuring out how to make solving those problems a profitable endeavour.

This is, in fact, what I'm arguing for.

What I mean by "the product" is making sure it is solving what customers need. And to be clear, by "customer" I mean the people that actually buy it, not share holders.

  > All code is throwaway, all code is worthless, solving real needs, wants and pain points for customers is the real source of value.

It is not. You can replace code, but you cannot just throw it away and continue to solve problems. That by definition makes it not worthless.

And again, I fully agree we should focus on needs, wants, and pain points. What I'm trying to argue is if you'll forgo that for making profits. Clearly this is what big tech companies are doing. They're shoving in things that are half baked, people don't want, and solve no problems. But they do it because it increases share prices. I'm saying, don't do that

I don't get why you feel your positions are so far apart. Caring about customers and focusing on the product at their most different seem to be perspectives on the same thing, and then only if a really squint.

You switched the object of focus from profit to customers as if they were interchangeable. You are also using code and product/tech interchangeably, forgetting that there is a lot of effort put into architecture, design and usability.

Caring about the customer is caring about the product. Caring solely about profit is what enshitifies products.

I don’t really see how you guys are in opposition. They said to focus on the product, not to focus on the code.

The engineer’s job is to care deeply about the technical aspects of doing well by the customer.

Yes, this is the exact opposite viewpoint parent was talking about. You're taking the MBA stance here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com