[throwawaylinux]

The other thing that would probably help engineers is that business and management is extremely difficult, in a way more than engineering, and that whether or not a particular person or decision is good or bad is often times not something that many engineers have the information or capability to evaluate.

I'm a cynic about business and management, not a manager and will not be one, am an engineer, also partake in the usual bitching about managers and business decisions that we all do.

But a lot of the hate is not too rational, and a lot of times the decisions that engineers would prefer would be disastrous for the company. Also, engineers really hate to share any responsibility for commercial failures. It must be a soul sucking job to run a company or sell a product that is uncompetitive. Talk to any engineer about their pet company or product or industry with some notable failure (Boeing, HP, DEC, Sun) and the story is always the same, management and bean counters sucked the life out of it to feed wall street parasites. You hear very little about how their products were sub-standard, too expensive, or out-competed by other companies despite their also being beholden to MBAs and shareholders and pointy haired bosses.

[tw98521358]

The product suffers when resource priority shifts in the wrong direction. Often times management infighting and empire building becomes the business priority and the actual product is a secondary evil that needs to limp along to fund the empires.

[throwawaylinux]

The right and wrong direction are up for debate. Everything is an opportunity cost, so if the product is not successful or making money, then shifting resources away from it to something more productive may sink the product faster, but might not have been the wrong for the business.

I've not known many executive decisions like that (right or wrong) being made without any input from technical side of the business, perhaps not Joe shitkicker in the trenches but technical leads. and I've very rarely encountered a technical person who concedes that their project or product or team should be given fewer resources. Almost always the complaint is that if only they were given more resources, they could have been successful, which rarely understands business and market realities and often confuses cause and effect.

And the egos and empire building and infighting and so on are definitely a thing that happens, and they are definitely not restricted to management. Engineers and technical people are some of the worst offenders!

I'm not trying to absolve executives and managers here, but I do think some engineers need better perspective and yes some empathy with the business side. Almost no new engineer needs to be told that their leaders are poor -- they'll hear it from their coworkers in their second week on the job and continuously after that until they retire. What I've rarely if ever heard is "damn we shipped a real piece of crap here, it must be embarrassing for our executives and sales people who have to sell it and answer to our customers, we could have done much better".