To clarify, I don't mean having no concern for the business or customer, but rather having that as a priority and the primary way to determine contribution. Engineers should care about the engineering first, which implicitly has value if done correctly.
That said, AI is about to change all this... but ironically this justifies my position. If software can be so powerful such that you can have a general intelligence that can do almost any cognitive task... then it follows that all this time engineers can also engineer clever systems that can add a lot of value to the company if engineered correctly.
There is no ceiling of how much performance and value can be squeezed out of a software system, but this never happens because businesses are not investing in actual engineering but rather in technical entrepreneurs that can bring something to market quickly enough.
> To clarify, I don't mean having no concern for the business or customer, but rather having that as a priority and the primary way to determine contribution. Engineers should care about the engineering first, which implicitly has value if done correctly
There is no “implicit value” of software to a company. The only value of a software to a company is whether it makes the company money or saves the company money. That’s it, there is no other reason for a company to pay anyone except to bring more value to the company than they cost to employ them.
If software can be so powerful such that you can have a general intelligence that can do almost any cognitive task... then it follows that all this time engineers can also engineer clever systems that can add a lot of value to the company if engineered correctly.
It’s just the opposite. If AI can do any of the coding that a software engineer can do and I am not saying that’s possible or ever will be, what’s becomes even more important are the people who know how to derive business value out of AI.
> There is no ceiling of how much performance and value can be squeezed out of a software system
That may be true. But what’s the cost benefit analysis? Should we all be programming in assembly? Should game developers write a custom bespoke game engines and optimize them for each platform?
> That’s it, there is no other reason for a company to pay anyone except to bring more value to the company than they cost to employ them.
The implicit part is that if you engineer a good system then it saves money with less bugs and breaks less, and also makes money by allowing faster development and iterations.
There are plenty of examples here. I could point at how the PlayStation network just went down for 24 hours, or how UIs are often still very laggy and buggy, or I can also point at companies like Vercel that are (I assume) very valuable by providing a convenient and easy way to deploy applications... the fact that there are many SaaS out there providing convenience of development proves that this adds value. Despite this businesses are not having their engineers do this in-house because somehow they don't see the immediate ROI for their own business. I would just call that lack of vision or creativity at the business level, where you can't see the value of a well engineered system.
Businesses are free to run their company in whichever way they please, and they can create crappy software if it makes them money, but the point is that when this is industry-wide it cripples the evolution of software and this is then felt by everyone with downtimes and bad experiences, even though hardware is unbelievably fast and performant.
> Should game developers write a custom bespoke game engines and optimize them for each platform?
This is a good example actually. Most companies that want full creative control are making their own engines. The only exception here is Unreal (other smaller engines are not used by large companies), and from what I can tell the Unreal engine is an example of great software. This is one of those exceptions where engineers are actually doing engineering and the company probably can't afford to have them do something else. Many companies could benefit from this, but it's just not as straight line from the engineering to profit and that's kind of the root of why there is so much bad software out there.
Right, but it's an example that illustrates a broader problem with how software still has the same issues it had for decades, especially in network programming and web. In contrast hardware has made huge advancements.
That said, AI is about to change all this... but ironically this justifies my position. If software can be so powerful such that you can have a general intelligence that can do almost any cognitive task... then it follows that all this time engineers can also engineer clever systems that can add a lot of value to the company if engineered correctly.
There is no ceiling of how much performance and value can be squeezed out of a software system, but this never happens because businesses are not investing in actual engineering but rather in technical entrepreneurs that can bring something to market quickly enough.