At what cost? See discussion here. And who bears the burden of that cost?
Sure you can look away from child labor providing you the latest iphones or lithium mines for the same or electric cars destroying pristine tropical jungles and entire ecosystems, many folks do so very comfortably. Then some others don't.
You participate in $the_thing so surely you must support $the_thing, right?
I would get value from stealing, I don't steal from people. The argument or question isn't about if it has value to some people, the question is, does the value to some people outweigh the costs that are imposed on others.
Said another way, a novel is about the experience of reading every word of implementation, whereas software is sufficient to be a black box, the functional output is all that matters. No one is reading assembly for example.
We’re moving into a world where suboptimal code doesn’t matter that much because it’s so cheap to produce.
1. Disagree. Plenty of companies still care about impact as a key metric in promotion processes so if working more increases impact, then it can increase rewards.
2. Not all this type of work is transactional. I’ve “worked” many extra hours for the pleasure of it, in which case it’s not working instead of living, it is living. This is the spirit of OPs article IMO.
Are the incompetent people your coworkers?
Ideally you can be solving your customers problems, which is a nice terminating lens of “always useful”, tho you may still want to pick and choose.
I’ve also seen some Really Really Bad software due to engineers having “Not Invented Here” syndrome. If it takes using big well known frameworks to avoid some of that it’s worth the cost.
It feels unsavory from the outside, but politics is also the art of getting stuff done. It’s not throwing your life away if you can point at an org chart and a roadmap delivered and say “I helped build that”. Leadership is just as important as implementation.
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