[mrmanner]

>> They don’t complain about business constraints and they put out stellar work.

> Given the above, humans will also factor in the moral and ethical side of what they are doing. And they can, will and should criticize those business constraints if those don't align with what they feel is "good" or "morally sound".

My thought after reading the article was that the author seemed to consider writing good code, maintainable code, and having a strategy prioritizing long term over short term needs as moral imperatives. Or at least the words and terms used were ones I often hear and use when discussing ethics and morals.

Which made me think, do many engineers consider these things as ethical decisions, rather than just business choices?

Personally I enjoy being involved in strategic decisions, both providing input and opinion - but I also see the value in adhering to a strategy once decided even if it isn’t the one I’d advocate for if it was up for discussion. For ethical decisions I’d reason differently - it’s not ok to break laws or destroy lives (etc etc) just because a business decision said so.

[pdimitar]

> My thought after reading the article was that the author seemed to consider writing good code, maintainable code, and having a strategy prioritizing long term over short term needs as moral imperatives. Or at least the words and terms used were ones I often hear and use when discussing ethics and morals.

I don't think the article's author said this. In my eyes he meant it more like "at least give us SOME breathing room to do our best engineering work!" -- meaning give some time for refactors, for changing tooling, for stepping back for 1-2 months and just looking at the whole thing in general.

Creativity needs time for pondering and reflection. Chasing ruthless and practically impossible deadlines while having to systemically ignore everything that made you a good engineer in the first place makes for a toxic employee<->employer relationship. And one that rarely ends well.