[rutthenut]

Sounds familiar. Product and sales areas of the business look at immediate revenues - and hopefully profit - but are always more keen to do that at the cost of increasing technical debt within the engineering side of the business. Unless sales see a real impact to technical debt, they will always choose the short-term approach.

[throwaway894345]

Agreed, and I don't think that's even necessarily the worst thing. It just means that engineering and product/sales have to have a conversation, mutual trust, and a shared vision that extends beyond the next quarter. These are hard things to cultivate, however.

[ethbr0]

Most of the places I've seen this go bad were because one side was incentivized to not care about the other.

If product has PM or financial incentives that reward without regard to technical debt...

If engineering has PM or financial incentives that reward without regard to user experience...

If you want people to cooperate, set up shared, team-based incentives!

[throwaway894345]

I agree. In whichever case, blaming individual engineers seems weird. Rarely are individual engineers to blame, and even when they are the organization should be robust enough to route around the occasional deficient engineer.