Engineers understand that the entire discipline is about tradeoffs. It would be extremely easy to build reliable, secure, performant, robust, etc software given infinite time and infinite budget. Engineering is about working in the real world, where you don't have infinite time or budget.
Is it correct to build a piece of software that runs 50% slower, but can be built in 6 months instead of 12? The answer is "it depends" and good engineers will seek to understand the broader context of the business, users, and customers to make that decision.
A conflict as old as time. Unfortunately, it's the MBA thinking that pays the company's bills.
An ideal world isn't one in which either the MBAs or the engineers win. It's one in which they coexist and find a reasonable balance between having more useful features than the competition and not expending too much effort to build and maintain those features.
No, it’s how anyone that’s actually worked in an SMB / non F-1000 / non household name company talks. Most “regular” companies need to focus on getting features out the door.
You are not anything until you act as something. Acting like an MBA makes you virtually indistinguishable from one. I don't care what you studied, it's what you're doing (or not) with it.
Your entire stance is no true Scotsman with ad hominem. You realize almost every YC company operates in the way I described until they become entrenched in their domain, right? Do you think pre PMF companies are bickering about unit test coverage? If they are, they’ll fail
It's really a basic point that I can call myself whatever I want, but if I walk and quack like a duck, I'm a duck.
YC is a VC firm which is a very specific context that demands things like revenue and growth to be so prioritized as to be implicit and core features of the working ideology. That's not really a good model for software engineering when it comes to social benefit -- it prioritizes something else. It can demonstrate incidental social benefit but that's not actually an incentive that's built into the system that YC operates in and reflects internally.
There are Scotsmen out there, they're just not part of this discussion. That doesn't make anything I said a "no true Scotsman" argument.
Shall I prepare the postage for the letter in which you'll call John Carmack an MBA? Should we send another to Chris Sawyer? I heard he didn't even write a formal design doc for Roller Coaster Tycoon!
You've either intentionally cast my argument as something it's not or you need to read a little deeper before replying.
Nowhere did I say sloppy code is the problem, what I said was justifying it in terms of profitability is the problem. There's a difference between cranking something out because you're excited to show it and rushing through an implementation because of this or that externally defined money-based KPI.
