Programming

It’s a cynical way to view the C-staff of a company. I think it’s also inaccurate: from my limited experience, the people who run large tech companies really do want to deliver good software to users.

From my much broader experience, this is missing the required cynicism that C-staff want to deliver software they think is good based on the criteria cynical yes staff tell them constantly is good. I’ve never met an exec that didn’t want to deliver something good; most execs I’ve met don’t actually understand what good is or how to benefit people.

The way the tech world has unfolded in the last 25 years is bound to make most people cynical.

Counterpoint : Fuck big tech. Fuck startups. Start a software co-op and make something actually useful, instead of yet another middle-man leech like Uber and Netflix.

“Companies are structurally set up to collude on salaries, but they’re not set up to deliberately make their employees sad - they just don’t have that kind of fine-grained control over the culture!”

This is such an insane take. I’d argue that hiring freezes are more common dictates than corporations following the law.

I don't think engineers need encouragement to be cynical. More often engineers need to lighten up.

Politics has no place in engineering disciplines. Imagine if we talked about building bridges like this. "Sorry your entire family died when the bridge failed. My boss has an ego and we have to use the shitty bolts he designed. I'm just doing my job"

Granted not all projects carry this degree of risk but we shouldn't normalize sub standard practice. Long term risk is generated by bad code which can be and often is detrimental to the profitablity of a project. One of your jobs as a software developer is to be able to communicate this effectively with management. There are cost implications to churning out shitty code.

Bad form > poor product > unsatisfied users > loss in sales to competitors

Should we though?