The inconvenient truth is that the business exists not to provide engineers with work they’re happy with or proud of but to make investors money. The good news is developer happiness is associated with increased productivity and reduced attrition which usually factors into the business calculus in a much bigger way.
klabb3|2 years ago
First that’s not always technically true because not all businesses have investors.
But assuming that the primary purpose is to make money, even that’s not precise since there’s a massive difference on optimizing for ROI tomorrow vs next quarter vs when you retire and hand your business over to others. Or different metrics altogether like market share or “engagement”. Those are all conflicting goals and have changed a lot just in a decade.
But even if you decide precisely which metric to aim for, there’s still a giant difference between primary purpose and only purpose. Simple things like a circuit breaker or a nail might be single purpose. But as soon as you step up almost everything is multi-purpose. A car, a house, even a hat have many degrees of freedom. A business has many unquantifiable components.
Anyway, the point is that giving carte blanche to decisions labeled with “business reasons” is at best lazy, and at worst legitimizes a sort of pseudo religious cargo cult worship of the “business truths” of the current year.
The truth is that nobody sits on magical predictive abilities, neither the 10x engineers nor the MBA grand poobahs. But it’s also clear that the companies with technical leadership and/or a high degree of engineering agency have been so successful in the last two decades, to the point of redefining the nature of business itself.
sokoloff|2 years ago
If I form a business and take no outside money, I am the investor, particularly in the context of GP’s point that “[businesses exist]…to make investors money.”