One thing I've learned over my career is that engineering seems to matter so little to a business's …

As an engineer, this realization was eye opening for me and had a massive impact to my approach. So few of those things that we're trained to approach with care and caution *really* matter at the end of the day. Sure, my engineering sensibilities and professional pride keep me honest to some extent. But the money inflow is what really matters, and engineering quality is just one very small piece of the puzzle for that.

> engineering seems to matter so little to a business's success That's because your engineering career coincides with a race to the bottom, where advertising-saturated, FOMO-afflicted consumers demonstrated a preference for accumulating as many cheap/free/subsidized things that they could over a few durable, valuable things that genuinely benefit them. It wasn't always that way, and if the economy does encounter a strong correction, it could very well change again.

It's usually just that the core product was built a long time ago, and that's 95% of what customers want. There's always the option of getting rid of all the engineers working on new stuff, and having a small support staff. Often times, customers would even prefer that.

>One thing I've learned over my career is that engineering seems to matter so little to a business's success So, let's see, the top tech companies in revenue are Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and some of the fastest growing ones are OpenAI and Anthropic. Do you know what all these have in common? They give extremely high compensation even compared to other large companies (microsoft is a bit of an exception here). So you think they just do this out of the goodness of their hearts, that these kind CEOs who would lay off tons of people on a whim, don't think engineering matters, but are paying 300k, 400k, 600k, 800k to software engineers?