Ask HN: On idealism vs. pragmatism in software engineering leadership

[moystard]

How do you navigate the challenges of fostering understanding and collaboration between engineering leaders (with perhaps different engineering skills) in the context of perceiving anticipation as idealism or dogmatism and rushing as pragmatism?

From experience, the “idealistic” approach ends up taking the same time and being more maintainable/scalable, even when time is limited (which is pragmatic in essence). Of course you need to strike a balance, but I found that anticipating, thinking about the end vision and cutting in that vision to shape a strong but reasonable proposal is often quickly categorised as idealistic.

I would love to hear your thoughts.