| OK. I'll try to play devil's advocate here. Disclaimer: I think of myself as an engineer. I do believe your frustration comes from observing actual issues and you're right to express your disappointment. However, I can see a lot of cynicism in your tone, and I feel there's a huge amount of judgement on those "cons" without trying to peek behind the curtain on what makes them behave like that. To provide a different viewpoint - I've often seen this desire to do tech in a tech-first way fail massively. Many of us consider ourselves techies, so we believe we work in the tech industry. But we don't. We work in Finance, Productivity, Mobility, Food and similar industries, even though we're engineers. Apart from developer tooling and some exceptions - those industries are not about the tech. Countless times, I've seen engineers spend valuable resources (their own time) delivering the perfect tech solutions for non-existing problems (or over-engineered and expensive solutions to real problems, which could have been solved without tech much easier) Without the "cons" of UX, business development and product management, people like those would always disconnect from customers. I do believe we should all try to find what motivates us and for many people here, this would be tech innovation. But dismissing the other roles in the companies we work with is just an endless utopia chasing, never productive. I've been lucky to work with some great non-tech people and learn a lot from them. And from 10+ years in the industries (plural), I've seen many more examples of over-engineered and useless tech than failure of "cons" to grasp why engineers should be put first. |
Assuming that everything is just about UX, PM and bizdev nets you the kind of mediocrity the OP is talking about. Sometimes what looks like over-engineering to the mediocre actually enables breaking new grounds in the hands of the excellent.