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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

One thing I've learned over my career is that engineering seems to matter so little to a business's success. As long as the engineering problems and failures aren't so bad that the salesfolks will get crucified in the town square and convince customers to leave, then seemingly everything can eventually be duct-taped over.

Obviously this isn't as true for things where it truly matters - encryption software, financial software, etc. - but it's amazing how little engineering excellent has to do with a company's success.

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> engineering seems to matter so little to a business's success

That's because your engineering career coincides with a race to the bottom, where advertising-saturated, FOMO-afflicted consumers demonstrated a preference for accumulating as many cheap/free/subsidized things that they could over a few durable, valuable things that genuinely benefit them.

It wasn't always that way, and if the economy does encounter a strong correction, it could very well change again.

It has always been this way though. Who is really qualified to evaluate something but another engineer? Perhaps the first record of a slop product is the Complaint to Ea-nāṣir from 1750 BC.

Not always. I think it's an inherent failure mode of markets when everyone is playing by the same rules.

You could simply invoke Goodhart's law: If the purpose of a business is to make money, its ability to make money is not a good measure of the value it creates. Except when there are competitors playing under different rules. Then capitalists need to make better products and services than their non-capitalist competitors to be able to make money in countries that can buy from either side.

During the Cold War, the planned economies of the communist block provided the necessary competition. When that competition disappeared, financialization gradually took over. Now there is China, which seems to be a command economy that uses markets as a tool and prioritizes the real economy over finances. Maybe it will provide enough competition to force capitalists behave again.

It's usually just that the core product was built a long time ago, and that's 95% of what customers want.

There's always the option of getting rid of all the engineers working on new stuff, and having a small support staff. Often times, customers would even prefer that.

spotify should do this

>One thing I've learned over my career is that engineering seems to matter so little to a business's success

So, let's see, the top tech companies in revenue are Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and some of the fastest growing ones are OpenAI and Anthropic.

Do you know what all these have in common? They give extremely high compensation even compared to other large companies (microsoft is a bit of an exception here).

So you think they just do this out of the goodness of their hearts, that these kind CEOs who would lay off tons of people on a whim, don't think engineering matters, but are paying 300k, 400k, 600k, 800k to software engineers?

As an engineer, this realization was eye opening for me and had a massive impact to my approach. So few of those things that we're trained to approach with care and caution *really* matter at the end of the day. Sure, my engineering sensibilities and professional pride keep me honest to some extent. But the money inflow is what really matters, and engineering quality is just one very small piece of the puzzle for that.

Fully agreed. I'm curious to learn though how your approach changed in particular.

I mean from a bigger picture view. I'm much more likely to think in broader context of what impact a decision would have to the business at large. And my view of that is much more accurate than it used to be, without the exaggerated sense of importance most people place on their work. In other words, I'm better at right sizing effort and velocity.

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