[gretch]

A lot of traditional engineering (civil, mechanical, etc) are non-competitive endeavors. For example, if you are supposed to make a bridge, you just design what you think a good bridge to be.

In the modern consumer application, you have to understand business concepts like differentiation. If your product is very good, but it’s strictly worse than another product in every dimension, you don’t get any credit for second place. You actually get close to zero sales because no consumer chooses your product over the alternative, in contrast to a “bad” product that does at least something very well in a niche.

[sarchertech]

Clearly there’s a difference between building a bridge and getting customers to use your free app, but the vast majority of Engineers aren’t working in big infrastructure projects. Even the ones who do are competing with everyone else who bids on the project.

And in software there are plenty of cases where the 2nd or 3rd place product gets tons of sales even if it’s strictly worse in every category. There are so many things that impact market success that are completely out of the hands of product or engineering.