[Kamq]

> regardless of your individual motivations and since there's really no inherent conflict either.

Within organizations, there's an inherent conflict between any orthogonal goals.

In theory there's no conflict, but in practice, there is constant competition for time and resources. This creates conflict between any groups whose goals are not aligned, including groups whose goals are completely unrelated. This is also why organizational politics is the way it is.

[ikari_pl]

you stated the condition/assumption - that the goals are orthogonal

I believe these are not - researchers publishing how to create good software and developers creating software may be seen as goals as aligned as fixing an incident and publishing a post mortem, or as writing an RFC and implementing it. Or publishing a post on how you remodeled your infrastructure.

They diverge at some point, yes, but that's not orthogonal at all

[Kamq]

> researchers publishing how to create good software

I disagree that this is what researchers are doing (at least from my point of view). This is actually an area where I agree with the article, there's a gigantic gulf between researchers and practitioners. The things that academia puts out are not, generally, what I would consider to be good software.

I think this fundamentally comes down to a difference in the definition of "good" between the two camps. So far as I can tell (not being an academic), the academic definition of "good" seems to revolve around software having certain provable characteristics. My definition of good software involves the software exhibiting useful characteristics. And those are, generally speaking, orthogonal. If not sometimes inhibiting each other.

But, of course I would think this, I'm a practitioner. The academics probably have similar complaints about me.

[bryanrasmussen]

I can see this is going to be one of those HN discussions that goes back and forth forever, maybe somebody should do some research on how orthogonal the goals really are!