The adversarial tension was all that ever made any of it work.
The "Perfectionist Engineer" without a "Pragmatic Executive" to press them into delivering something good enough would of course still been in their workshop, tinkering away, when the market had already closed.
But the "Pragmatic Executive" without the "Perfectionist Engineer" around to temper their naive optimism would just as soon find themselves chased from the market for selling gilded junk.
You're right that there do seem to be some execs, in the naive optimism that defines them, eager to see if this technology finally lets them bring their vision to market without the engineer to balance them.
That's a nice balanced wholesome take, only the problem is that the "Pragmatic Executive" is more like "Career-driven frenzied 'ship it today at all costs' psychopath executive".
You are describing a push-and-pull / tug-of-war balanced relationship. In reality that's absolutely exactly never balanced. The engineer has 1% say, the other 99% go to the executive.
I so wish your take was universally applicable. In my 24 years of career, it was not.
>The engineer has 1% say, the other 99% go to the executive.
This has also been my experience. Not to mention "fighting back" usually comes at personal cost in various ways from reputation to creating more unpaid work for yourself, including the time you spend on trying to make things right that now means you are behind on your "real work".
Don't forget you "no longer work well with others" if you start standing up to mediocrity that everyone else is either too stupid to notice, or too afraid to fight back against because they don't want to harm their career.
I am mostly starting to make my peace with all this and learning when is a good time to really fight (hint: almost never).
And I don't quite buy HN's group-think of "find a better job, duh". The market has been difficult in the last years and also the "better jobs" are nowhere nearly as accessible as privileged people believe.
Best way to handle things, I have found, is to dress the decisions in money and time. Position yourself as a realist who speaks numbers and if you are lucky -- meaning you don't get contested by other techies who simply want to shine in
front of the boss -- then you will have at least the product people on your side.
All that being said, of course at one point you should leave. In no form of relationship, work, friends, intimate, should you let yourself be walked all over for a long time. Start fighting the good fight in the company... and start polishing your resume and go do interviews.
The "Perfectionist Engineer" without a "Pragmatic Executive" to press them into delivering something good enough would of course still been in their workshop, tinkering away, when the market had already closed.
But the "Pragmatic Executive" without the "Perfectionist Engineer" around to temper their naive optimism would just as soon find themselves chased from the market for selling gilded junk.
You're right that there do seem to be some execs, in the naive optimism that defines them, eager to see if this technology finally lets them bring their vision to market without the engineer to balance them.
We'll see how it goes, I guess.