[spyke112]

Maybe it’s not the engineers that need to grow up, but the indecisive product people incapable of sticking to their principles for more than a week at a time.

That statement may be a bit much, but working in organizations unable to, well, organize around ideas leads to the state we’re in today, where most developers has to run around like headless chickens and put out fires. There’s exceptions, but from my point of view they are pretty rare.

[austin-cheney]

It's actually neither. Its the software leadership. Ideally the product people should know what they want and provide that in writing, because that is what they are getting (whether or not it's what they really want). The developers/engineers are responsible for building according to the requirements and constraints provided.

Somebody has to own that. Ownership is important because that's where risk and failure live, and somebody ultimately must make the adult decisions that drives the product forward. Software leadership own the process definitions and risk acceptance while project managers own the budget and process operations.

In software this is often tiny, so its easy to gloss over and get sloppy. Consider freeway construction though which deals with a project budget that can exceed $5-20 billion, physical inventory, hundreds of people on site providing labor, and much more. There is still engineering, product delivery, a customer, and such but the liability is greater, so the planning and ownership are more disciplined. The incentives are also greater. As a result planning and modeling become more important. Injuries and defects cost money and result in halted work, so you have to account for risks and personnel in your planning. When there is no liability and limited incentives people have no real motivation to take ownership.

Other industries solve for this with some combination of licensing and broker/agent model. Licensing solves two problems. First, it sets the minimally acceptable baseline to practice and second it defines a set of ethics that become more important than employer directives.

[kbolino]

There's definitely some interplay here.

I've worked with what I consider to be true software engineers. They cared about the craft, about the quality of what they produced, and about the process to get there. But that team was broken up because it worked too slowly relative to less caring developers, and stuck too closely to established tech instead of shiny new things. Some of the people remained, but they were now just software developers, writing code to deliver features and meet deadlines, now counting down the days to retirement.

I've also seen quality focus conflated with architecture astronauts since both take more upfront time. When product requirements are vague, there's a tendency to design a more generalized system than strictly necessary. But not all slower speeds are for the same reason. Taking some time to think out how to meet current and immediately foreseeable needs is not the same as wasting time designing for all possibilities, but a lot of people don't seem to understand the difference. Also, sometimes you do have to go through a bit of overengineering just to learn the shape and boundaries of what you're doing.

[ryandrake]

Yes, yes, it’s “the product people.” Or “the managers.” Anyone but ourselves. If they would just stop changing requirements, we’d stop writing awful, buggy software. Not sure I really buy it. I’ve worked in software my whole life and I have never met any software engineering team who would magically have more discipline and rigor if only the managers went away. A team that cuts corners and shortchanges testing when the clock is ticking is likely also going to do that when the deadlines are more achievable. Attention to detail, measurement, thoroughness, an obsession with correctness… these are not environment specific things that come and go. They are traits of individual developers. You either have them or you don’t, and a screaming, impatient “product guy” can’t take these things out of you.

I'll admit that companies can set up processes that encourage (or discourage) rigor, and I firmly believe you can train the yolo out of software engineers. So it's not hopeless. It is very helpful to be in a company that values these things.