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What is going on right now?

(catskull.net)
378 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 22 Aug 25 07:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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ascendantlogic ◴[22 Aug 25 13:42 UTC] No.44984607[source]▶
> Here’s the thing - we want to help. We want to build good things. Things that work well, that make people’s lives easier. We want to teach people how to do software engineering!

This is not what companies want. Companies want "value" that customers will pay for as quickly and cheaply as possible. As entities they don't care about craftsmanship or anything like that. Just deliver the value quickly and cheaply. Its this fundamental mismatch between what engineers want to do (build elegant, well functioning tools) and what businesses want to do (the bare minimum to get someone to give them as much money as possible) that is driving this sort of pulling-our-hair-out sentiment on the engineering side.

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Lauris100 ◴[22 Aug 25 13:57 UTC] No.44984767[source]▶
“The only way to go fast, is to go well.” Robert C. Martin

Maybe spaghetti code delivers value as quickly as possible in the short term, but there is a risk that it will catch up in the long term - hard to add features, slow iterations - ultimately losing customers, revenue and growth.

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1. const_cast ◴[22 Aug 25 14:33 UTC] No.44985172[source]▶
This is true, but what I've come to realize is companies only prioritize the short term, no matter what, no exceptions. They take everything on as debt.

They don't care about losing customers 10 years later because they're optimizing for next quarter. But they do that every quarter.

Does this eventually blow up? Uh, yeah, big time. Look at GE, Intel, Xerox, IBM, you name it.

But you can get shockingly far only thinking about tomorrow over and over again. Sometimes, like, 100 years far. Well by then we're all dead anyway so who cares.