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Re:Philosophies for Software Engineers by dasil003 on Saturday February 13, 2016 @12:12PM (#11094714)
The flip side of this is the incompetent developer who produces hunks of irretrievably flawed spaghetti code which works just well enough to get paid, but is a technical dead end that will never work well enough for the company to derive long-term value.

Granted, it's easier to be a useless biz guy than it is to be a useless developer since there's no litmus test for the former, but it's absolutely true that both exist. Your goal is to steer far clear of them.

Re:Philosophies for Software Engineers by pbh101 on Saturday February 13, 2016 @12:48PM (#11094864)
While I agree with you, I want to note that long-term value is often not what these businesses want or need: the work required to get LTV is often perceived as delaying time to market, and sometimes the right choice is to optimize time to market over correctness or soundness.

In my experience this is frequently an unstated source of contention and unaligned expectations between engineering and business sides of the organization and one that is very useful (and liberating!) to get aligned on from the outset of a venture. And frequently, compensation structure is a useful part of that alignment: if you will also benefit from the time to market, that tradeoff feels less like someone asking you to make more work for yourself or others down the road (in the form of ops or rewriting)