[markus_zhang]

I’m trying to get a bit away from the business stakeholders, into more technically required roles. Eventually my goal is to get into a system programming role.

The issue with roles close to business is that it doesn’t provide the right soil for good engineering . Your stakeholders have no concept of engineering and wants everything ASAP; Your manager is just a yes man who takes all tickets, and want you to use AI for everything because it’s so easy and quick; Your VP thinks your team is not moving quickly enough; Your VP puts speed before quality literally.

The thing is, I believe that some roles and some industries just don’t care about good engineering. If you want to be a good engineer, you have to stay away from them, even if they are high paying, and get yourself into a system programming role, in a company that fails you if you do not have good engineering practices. The only way to be a good engineer is to put yourself in such an environment that you will almost surely fail if you are not a good one. There is a cool-aid and many engineers drink that the most important thing is "business value", and I politely vomit that all out a while ago. The new rule is to become an engineer that they are still willing to pay you even if you spit on their faces.

Those roles and companies can die and I don’t give a fuck about those business clowns.

[senfiaj]

In my company it's a bit more complicated, but I have the spirit of your thoughts. I think business software (such as the ERP-like software I work on) is often an entropy magnet from the complexity point of view. It doesn't strive to be simple and elegant because business / finance world is messy. Whether all the complexity and messiness of the financial world is accidental or justified, this is irrelevant for me because I don't care about their business problems. It will be soul sucking anyway.

[markus_zhang]

Yeah I agree. And sometimes it is not really the complexity. For example, kernel or compilers are very complicated in certain way, too, but whichever company makes those products probably is way more stringent about the quality comparing to other companies that are happy to move forward with tons of bugs and tech debts.

[senfiaj]

>> For example, kernel or compilers are very complicated in certain way, too, but whichever company makes those products probably is way more stringent about the quality comparing to other companies that are happy to move forward with tons of bugs and tech debts.

IMHO, the complexity of kernel and compilers is usually more justified and less accidental. At least non technical people are rarely the cause.

[markus_zhang]

Yeah I’d rather fight with concurrency or obscure language features than fight with ever changing and ambiguous business rules.