The success of any endeavor in the tech industry hinges significantly on the caliber of software engineers. In the absence of skilled SWEs, the contributions of other roles lose their significance. Despite having exceptional project managers, marketing strategies, infrastructure, IT support, or groundbreaking ideas, the ultimate truth lies within the code. If the code is subpar, progress becomes elusive. It is essential to prioritize quality from the foundational level and build upon it. In the past few weeks, I've been heavily involved in numerous meetings as we work on a major overhaul of our infrastructure. We have had major outages, in past year. While our Infrastructure team has been performing well, there have been significant challenges with some of our Development team's applications. These applications are inefficient and consume excessive resources. And to know what is always breaking, we are logging way more than we should, almost everything, this is creating its own issues. Unfortunately, many of us lack the time and visibility to delve into these issues and rectify them. Additionally, our limited interaction with customers has left us unaware of the logic and business requirements behind certain features. Moreover, the Development team tends to prioritize new features over addressing existing problems. As a result, we are constantly tasked with scaling our operations without resolving the lingering issues. It feels like a never-ending race to the bottom, but we must do what needs to be done. In this landscape, skilled software engineers are crucial, as they play a vital role in overcoming these challenges.#TIL #Today I Learned #bankersfinancial #tech
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Huh, I was at a startup once that had top notch engineers with 100% test coverage, all sorts of amazingness in the code. The startup still failed coz of product market fit, bad CEO decisions, marketing failures
This. Throw the best engineers in the world at the wrong idea and the company is going to fail spectacularly. History is littered with beautifully engineered failed products.
The moral of the story is Having great eng team and being in bed with top VCs = success.
OP Fortinet just learned about Tech Debt, which isn't always because SWEs are sh*t.
No time to fix debts, ship ship ship mentality and move fast break things BS. EM just wants the feature to be done in less than a sprint
Conversely, the best SWE's in the world can't fix poor product vision.
The best SWEs in the world would recognize the product vision is bad, reach out to PMs/execs and course correct. I've done that at a previous job once (not claiming to be best SWE, just pointing out that you can basically do whatever if you take initiative and are persuasive enough). SWE doesn't mean you're a robot who follows orders. You're an employee of the company and therefore invested in its success.
I don't think we are talking about the same thing even remotely. Early in my career I worked at startups just to get the experience even though I thought the entire company vision was stupid. Came from a non-CS background so I just needed to gain engineering skills. A SWE can't course correct an entire company or even an entire product if it's a dumb idea to begin with
You can sell a mediocre product and make it a smashing success (looking at you, Jira), but you can't engineer your way out of a shitty marketing fit. I think engineers tend to overestimate how important they are to the entire success. The truth hurts but from a 30,000 feet POV it's almost always marketing that ends up being the most important element. Sauce: Family of business owners, of which I'm the only W2 wageslave π
Indeed. The only reason our TC is what it is has to do with the labor supply. Niche skillset to begin with and even harder to find people with actual competency. But if engineering skill was the primary factor in a successful product, we would all be running our own companies.
Our product is well established and has a lot of new users. The problem is scaling. We are adding a lot of servers to scale and for reliability. But seems a lot of features has bugs here and there which are apparent now. We need 5 9s.
Your post is exactly why I left infrastructure...I miss it but it's a thankless job
What did you transition to?
Yeah, what did you transition to ?
Good product with decent code is still better than a bad product engineered to perfection
^
Perhaps new features are what they're being told to prioritize by management. It be like that sometimes.
I dunno, a lot of stuff is just a service to business folk. You need sales marketing and product fit for your "this does a service for your marketing and sales dept (or accounting, or analytics group, or...) and data can be pushed to Zapier" company.
Are you associated with the infra team which has tension with the development team?
I am the Infra Team π