The disconnect is more between long term business value, and short term benefit for the most parasitic and manipulative actors within the business.
Engineering and business value go hand-in-hand in a healthy tech/engineering business.
A business that was built on great/innovative engineering, became successful, and then got taken over by various impostors and social manipulators, who's primary goal is gaming various internal metrics for their own gain, is not a healthy business.
The goal wasn't to mock Boeing, just to point out what happens when business overrides engineering. The context is the parent post making the point that there is little business value in good engineering.
Ah, I see where you're coming from. I've been hearing a lot of people talk poorly of aerospace as a whole recently, due to some Boeing issues, and I misread your comment as such. Apologies and thanks.
I think that’s a bit unfair. I’d say shipping a product that solves a problem is the baseline entry fee into the market, just table stakes. Profitability is determined by the machine built around the product, like the efficiency of capital deployment, the speed of distribution, the defensibility of the business model against competition, etc. The product is just one variable in a much bigger equation.
Ime, a lot of the onus falls on Engineering and Product Management failing to make a case for why certain engineering decisions (eg. Investing in continual tech debt grooming) have business value.
The point of a business is to generate revenue. The point of employees is to do work that helps generate revenue. As such, any decision needs to ensure it has a business case aligned with revenue generation.
Good engineering hygine has significant business value such as in speeding up delivery of new features as well as keeping certain customers happy, but in a lot of cases there is an inability to communicate from either direction (eg. PMs not giving Eng full visibility into business decisions, and Eng not being able to explain why certain engineering choices have business value). If you cannot communicate why this matters, you aren't going to get it prioritized.
Unsurprisingly, at big organizations, communication can take the backseat because communication is hard and at a large company, there is some amount of complacency because the product is good enough.
Edit: Unsurprisingly got downvoted.
The only reason you are employed is to make value (which generally is measured in revenue generated). You are not paid $200k-$400k TCs to write pretty or a e s t h e t i c code. You can make a case for why that matters, but if you choose to bury your head in the sand and not make that case, I have no sympathy for you.
Well maybe you get hit with the gray arrows because you first make a sweeping generalization and then say "I have no sympathy for you". Food for thought?
I have communicated the business value in addressing tech debt, as in I have pointed out how many critical customer features got delayed by it and we churn customers we really can't afford to.
Still got overruled. The tech lead stepped in and threw his weight around with zero explanation to the CTO or the CEO. Who needs to hear what the engineers on the ground have to say, right? They cannot communicate!
Man, tearing down strawmen is easy. You should do better and see nuance. A lot of engineers communicate very well and are still ignored.
I think we are both operating on our priors. At least here in the Bay Area, those kinds of workplaces don't survive over the long term due to their incompetence and toxicity dragging down execution. I can't speak for where you might be.
When all leadership is asking is "what is the short term business value?", it's pointless to make that case. It's much easier to measure "yet another feature" than "fix the root causes of what makes our product subpar and slows us down". Not only that, but an incompetent engineer's "tech debt grooming" may make things worse.
I think that this may eventually become better now that there isn't so much dumb money around (no ZIRP) and with AI assistants taking on some low-effort work (enabling companies to lay off incompetent engineers). But it will take many years for companies to adapt and the transition won't be pretty.
In the long term, once the damage from vibecoding is better understood (for customer impact and team morale), there's an incentive to push them out, both from the leadership and the individuals side.
I work for some event ticketing business and I'd sign this. My bosses want features quickly. Does not matter to them if I need extra time to make stuff secure, doesn't matter to them if it wont scale. Its about short term revenue. Can always rebuild the software to fit the next short term goal...
If you understand what are the metrics being tracked, and what are the primary goals that an initiative or product has, you can make a case.
We are an engineering discipline and engineering decisions can have revenue making implications. But it is hubris to assume why you should care about the nitty gritties of a codebase. It's the same way no one in leadership cares about the nitty-gritties of HR policies or accounting practices - people are hired to deal with the intricacies.
When I was a PM, I didn't have a difficult time making a business case for "keep the lights on" or tech debt work so long as I was able to attach tangible revenue implications (eg. X customer might churn because of subpar experience and we have both customer testimony and user stats showing that) or roadmap implications (eg. If we spend 6 months refactoring our monorepo, we can add new revenue generating modules every quarter instead of annually).
Communication is not hard, it's very easy, but there are actors who's goal is to obfuscate communication and prevent others from participating.
At the end of the day it comes down to who the decision makers are and how they are incentivized to act. As a simple example - company X has product C, and they set a goal of increasing usage of feature F (of product C). Currently this feature F completely sucks and users don't want to use it - so the idea is to improve it and thus increase usage.
There are 2 ways of increasing usage:
1) Make the feature F more useful/better.
2) Force/push your users to use feature F, by aggressively marketing it, and pushing it within the product surfaces, making it non-optional, etc. and other dark patterns.
Option (1) is hard to do - it requires deep understanding of the product, user needs, the related tech, etc. It requires close tactical collaboration between product and engineering.
Option (2) is easy to do - it requires ~zero innovative thinking, very surface-level understanding of the problem, and relies purely on dark patterns and sketchy marketing tricks. You can almost completely ignore your engineers and any technical debt when following this approach.
If your decision makers are imposter PMs and marketing/sales people - they will almost always choose option 2. They will increase the 'apparent usage' of this feature in the short term, while reducing overall customer satisfaction increasing annoyance, and reducing the company's overall reputation. This is exactly how many 'growth' teams operate. Short term benefit/gaming of metrics for long term loss/reputational damage. Their success metrics are always short-term and linked directly to bonuses - long term effects of these kinds of strategies are ~always completely ignored.
Relatively long distances of road and power transmission lines to reach the two most remote locations. Especially considering they seem to be limited in capacity (only 319 and 469MW).
Curious to know if something bigger was in the plans, or perhaps the road also have/had other uses?
The piece of the puzzle that you're missing is the dams at the far end of the road divert the Caniapiscau River into the La Grande River, which provides close to half the water that eventually feeds all of the generating stations downstream.
Additionally, the reservoirs formed are important for making the system provide reliable power to match demand - demand for power in Quebec peaks in the coldest parts of winter, and the natural peak of runoff/river flow....is not then.
So, the generation out there is useful but is not the primary reason why the road was built all the way out to there.
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No special insight on the difficulty/expense of constructing the transmission, but ~788MW of extremely cheap power forever for constructing/maintaining ~130mi of extra transmission doesn't seem completely improbable to work out financially, especially at the time.
I'll also note:
- Vegetation maintenance costs are probably low given how slow things grow out there.
- This was constructed long before the modern era of cheap(er) renewables.
- Even today, Quebec's location, weather, and time of year of peak demand make the calculation for solar's cost-effectiveness a lot harder.
I see the low-code stuff as an opportunity to let the business-folks handle the usecases where the complexity is low, and value of rapid iteration with deep domain-knowledge is more valuable.
Also, they might get a better understanding of why the code stuff might make sense when stuff is actually getting complicated :)
I can imagine a few instances where giving a node-editor to business would have been a way better solution than having us re-implement it in code continuously. That said, that was always in the context of a larger, domain specific piece of software. Where I think low-code falls flat is trying to be a general purpose programming tool, which means for someone to do their domain specific tasks, learning how to make a general purpose program from scratch is a big ask. I think low-code editors should focus on this portion of the user's journey. Getting data in, data storage, manipulation, image processing, reaching out to APIs, all that stuff needs to be as easy as possible.
> My main issue with low-code/no-code is that it attempts to solve the complexity problem, without understanding what "complexity" is.
I get your point. But without low/no-code tools I would argue a lot of simple workflows have to be implemented using code. These usecases, where the technology-side is simple, is a good fit for low/no-code platforms IMO
The magic will always be in deciding where to stop using low/no-code and start using actual code. domain specific and opinionated low/no-code tools with clear boundaries on what the tool can and can't do would be a good thing but the markets would be small and that's a bad thing.
I've seen teams spend a lot of time in low/no-code tools and either it grows more complex than actual code or they resort to the escape hatch (node that executes user defined code) and the visual tool basically becomes a container for actual code.
Also, the dream usually is put the effectiveness of software developers into the hands of people who are not software developers. However, it never seems to fail that the low/no-code work ends up back in the lap of software developers because of the typical product/project delivery lifecycle.
> I've seen teams spend a lot of time in low/no-code tools and either it grows more complex than actual code or they resort to the escape hatch (node that executes user defined code) and the visual tool basically becomes a container for actual code.
The ideal state alluded to is that Dev teams write modules that cleanly 'plug in' to the flowchart mess, but the reality is that a Dev team that can write code at that level (in a modern world, it implies at least an abstract/subconscious understanding of mid-advanced FP-ish concepts, including merging Procedural things like calling the bizarre webservice you're probably integrating with, while striving for idempotency based on the provided args/context.)
At that point, said devs likely are of a skillset they could build a framework for lower TCO, or at the very least are productive enough that they aren't the problem.
Agreed. The cynic in me hears business execs saying “we want non-programmers to be as effective as programmers”, and what I really hear is “we don’t pay these people nearly as much, can we get them to do it instead?”
