"The only thing that matters"

With this myopic attitude you'll get your business up and off the ground fast. Good job.

Then you will be mercilessly hacked.

Once you rename your startup to avoid the negative publicity, you'll hit a performance wall.

You'll lose customer data (and the associated customers) while you try to figure out what the four letters in ACID actually mean.

AWS will take 80% of your profits.

A different company will have taken their time, done it properly, and eat your lunch. They'll take the customers that lost data, as well as the customers that couldn't stand your slow-ass website.

Then they will mercilessly undercut you, because they're not scaling to infinity to compensate for an O(n^3) algorithm being used to scan database tables in their entirety by Mr I Know How to Bang Out Code.

You live in a parallel universe. Hacked ? So what ? Equifax got hacked too. Its valuation is literally up 150% since then lol. People make more money selling wordpress themes than I do selling low-latency C++.

Equifax is a monopoly. Run-of-the-mill companies will lose contracts and money when their infrastructure goes down or some crypto miner explodes their aws bill.

Optimizing is a different item, it reduces costs... More profit, better costs for customers, potentially undercut other companies with prices that are not feasible / offer more features.

o(n^3) bugs happen, sure, once every two year. So the 99.99% rest of the time, wondering about it is useless... Just as much as nitpicking over which version of Eclipse or gradle or whatever to use. In the grand scheme of software projects, these are not super relevant. Making code robust to crazy unexpected inputs is much more important. Making code that is easy to read (that is, readable without knowing tons of frameworks or technical details) is much more important.. At least in business computing.

Now they are niche when these issues do matter...

Both POV are myopic.

One wants to get things done to the exclusion of all else. Possibly trapping you into a corner if you need to ever scale.

And the other wants to “do it the right way from day one“. An undertaking that would cost more than a small business could ever hope to afford or slowing you down giving rivals time to catch up.

I don't really get why you seem to believe there are just two extremes and that's it. I don't think "do it right from day one" means that you never accumulate technical debt or that you write the perfect architecture that anticipates every possible future need.

Doing it right, to me, means hiring people who can adapt to changing conditions and needs, and who can make (or help you make) the right trade offs when you have to balance faster time-to-market (which can involve cutting corners) against avoiding technical debt.

The team that lives inside IntelliJ and can't do anything outside it is not going to do that for you.

>I don't really get why you seem to believe there are just two extremes and that's it.

Well, we’re only discussing a specific dimension of software development here. In reality there are a whole bunch of things not even related to software that will cause problems.

It's not about being pretty, it's about understanding when you're incurring lots of technical debt that's going to bite you in the ass down the road. There's nothing wrong with implementing a complex system in the likes of Max/MSP necessarily but it should be a reasoned decision, not something you do reflexively because you just don't know any better.

Indeed. I had a boss who didn't "know any better" about a lot of things, so he often could only think of one solution to any problem.

My thought when people only have one solution to a problem: If you can only think of one solution, how do you know it's not the worst one?

There are millions of business that "work" but that doesn't mean they are places I want to work. Personally I put the bar higher than "I'll just use the magic wizard and hope it works" and I'd prefer working with similar minded people

But it isn't the job of the university to create people you want to work with ?

My preference is to work with teams of people that strive for something else than "I'll just use the magic wizard and hope it works." Others can have other preferences.

I don't have an opinion where these people develop these attitudes/skills

No, unless it's a "professionalization degree" or whatever you call it on your corner of the world.

That's the huge majority of all degrees in university ? In my country, from the figures I can find online, there are ~20k "pro" masters vs a few hundred "research" ones. It's entirely negligible (I know it firsthand having been through the research path, which was a single-digit percent of the students in the "pro" path)

It actually is, because why would I pass them during an interview if I don't want to work with them? Thus, the students will be locked out of good jobs - and it's the university's job to give the student the necessary skills to find a good job.

Maybe "can it make a business that works" is the only thing that matters to you, but it's not to me. If I have to spend my days dealing with developers who can't think outside of a tiny box, I will be miserable. I don't care how much money the business makes; that's not how I want to live my life.

And what happens after you get that business running and bringing in some revenue, but you need to start tackling harder problems in order to keep your current customers happy and attract new customers? You're stuck with a bunch of developers poorly suited to solving those problems, and a bunch of infrastructure that wasn't designed with this sort of feature expansion in mind.

So you hire some new people who have to rewrite a bunch of things, or who have to spend months or quarters untangling the mess. You could even miss your market opportunity. Even if you don't, you've still wasted a lot of time and money.

> Maybe "can it make a business that works" is the only thing that matters to you, but it's not to me.

What I want doesn't matter any more than what you want regarding this. What matters is what the society as a whole wants, and the current situation is in big part the manifestation of it.

> And what happens after you get that business running and bringing in some revenue, but you need to start tackling harder problems in order to keep your current customers happy and attract new customers? You're stuck with a bunch of developers poorly suited to solving those problems, and a bunch of infrastructure that wasn't designed with this sort of feature expansion in mind.

you're assuming that you would even have gotten the first customers if things were "done right". My experience seeing entire businesses held by 1kloc of "academic" (I'm not saying this as a compliment) python scripts with 20% of it being globals succeeding says otherwise.

> "can it make a business that works"

For how long? Until it needs a rewrite because it’s completely unmanageable. Yes I know, the rewrite cycle is part of the business now, but I don’t think it’s necessary. We can do better.