[joelthelion]

> That means that the number one consideration for the software is profitability. For internal-only software, this means that cost is the prime consideration.

> In support of that, often software startups are trying to capture a winner-takes-all market, so time-to-market is critical.

I think we software engineers should embrace this reality, and learn to live with it. Your employer is willing to spend years to develop top-notch quality software? Great, you can employ all the software engineering best practices. That's not the case? Well, we should have a standard approach for gracefully handling strong time constraints without completely giving up on quality.

[smackay]

Therein lies the disconnect between what we want to achieve as a profession and the commercial needs of companies. Too often these are conflated in our view of what we do and that creates unhappy developers pushed to deliver stuff quickly is the result.

One way this unhappiness with our lot is expressed is Technical Debt. For me this just cognitive dissonance on the developers part trying to reconcile / justify why the codebase is a mess and why all those shortcuts were taken to get the thing shipped. If you want to pursue your craft and deliver a result you would be proud of then probably commercial software companies are not for you.

Well all might be great writers at heart but if all the employers want is a pool of people to write pulp fiction and romance novels the sooner we get over it the better.

Of course one solution to this identity crisis is sort of mapped out with Erik Dietrich's Developer Hegemony, https://leanpub.com/developerhegemony but it might take a while to get there.