Yes! I often tell people this in interviews and they act like I don’t have enough technical knowledge. The cult of Leetcode has made this so much worse.

You rarely, if ever, need Leetcode. What you need is to understand deeply what you should be building so you don’t waste everyone’s time!

Part of the issue is that they often don't want you to decide what to build. They've separated out the "building" from the "deciding what to build", so hearing from a candidate that it's important to focus on what to do is off-putting to an organization that just wants you to munch through JIRA tickets all day and find technical solutions to whatever somebody else wants, and then keep a smile on as they change their mind and discard the feature.

100%. Legacy company management finds software engineers who engage in the very relevant question of "what to build" extremely threatening. In my experience they actually treat software engineers who behave that way as disloyal.

As compared to places like tesla/shopify/etc where the Steve Jobs quote rules the roost:

    It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.

And it's not only about features that go unused, but also features that are used but only in support of workflows that improves nobody's life. Or functionality that's used but is a wildly inefficient version of what could have been.

I’m curious about what you’d consider concrete examples of these inefficient solutions? The biggest thing that comes to my mind are SPAs that don’t need to be SPAs.

One example from my employment history was a customer that kept asking for (and unfortunately getting) one special reporting feature after another in a data processing system.

After a couple of years and several such reporting options someone asked, "Can't we just generate a spreadsheet and then your business analysts can do whatever reports they want from that?" and the customer responded, "You can do that?! That would be so much easier for us."

Imagine the weeks or even months of human life (both implementing but also using the less efficient reports) that could have been saved if the right solution had been implemented from the start.

That's literally time taken out of someone's life that they could have used to be with family or whatever they wanted instead of transcribing ridiculous reports.

(Of course, those reports were probably only generated to be looked at once in some recurring management meeting, only for the executives to feel good about having seen data. I don't think the reports were ever used to support any decision.

This means the entire reporting theatre was completely bullshit and the customer could have paid the business analysts to sip drinks on the beach instead with no loss of productivity. But that's just my cynical view.)

> That's literally time taken out of someone's life that they could have used to be with family or whatever they wanted instead of transcribing ridiculous reports.

Only if the product is run by one or two people who give each other that much time off. *Much* more likely, this work not commissioned by the client, leaving space for other work to be done.

This "automation will lead to more free time" is a utter utter myth, because those with the power to pay staff will just sell their staff's time+skills to someone else/some other problem.

You're right, of course. In practise, the organisation would likely make up some other bullshit work to fill up the time, because God forbid people get to enjoy life!

(There's a tiny chance the void would be filled with useful work, and that's also a good outcome in my book.)

> The biggest thing that comes to my mind are SPAs that don’t need to be SPAs.

These are unlikely to be technical issues, and more people/process issues. SPAs are popular because they optimsie for developer productivity (so arguably the opposite). Others have talked about them, but examples like focusing on the wrong problems to solve (if you're a startup making a video game, do you really need to build your own chat app? [0])

[0] https://nira.com/slack-history/

> The amount of waste is staggering. Working on the right thing is way more than a 10x multiplier.

How much of that waste would you attribute to 1x programmers and how much would you attribute to 0x managers?

85% in favor of managers being the problem. I pulled that number from the Ford Motor Company turnaround where Deming said management was 85% of the problem.

And I mean, who is responsible for curating those 1x engineers in the first place?

I would attribute most of it to poor customer development or product management. If you can’t find the demand for your product, it doesn’t matter how good the engineers or managers are.

Failed projects are inevitable though, even if you do everything well. Good teams don’t look for people to blame, which results in no one sticking their neck out to advocate for stuff. Instead they look to learn from each experience and hone their processes.

> the majority of finished code generated by professionals goes unused

What are you referring to?

I'm referring to how companies ignore the thorny problem of what to build and instead focus on getting "Something done", which results in delivery of product increment that users at best say "meh" to, and don't use.

As an aside, from a developers perspective, all of the work is clearly valuable, I mean they got paid 300k+. But from a true definition of value perspective, the change increment is just not valuable to the users as evidenced by the lack of use.

    Value:  Reliable fulfillment of needs

> from a developers perspective, all of the work is clearly valuable, I mean they got paid 300k+

Midwestern US salary caps are more like $90k-$150k.