<story><title>The Longflow Manifesto</title><url>https://github.com/Nax/longflow-manifesto/blob/master/README.md</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AbrahamParangi</author><text>No offense intended to the author, but it sounds like they&amp;#x27;ve mistaken the purpose of their job. For most engineers, their job is &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; to produce exceptionally wonderful engineering.&lt;p&gt;It is to produce whatever god-forsaken clusterfuck is required to get the product out before the holiday rush. Or more generally to do whatever the business needs to do in order to keep making enough money to continue existing.&lt;p&gt;If engineering doesn&amp;#x27;t directly serve business goals, maybe that business doesn&amp;#x27;t really need that engineering department.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>taneq</author><text>&amp;gt; If engineering doesn&amp;#x27;t directly serve business goals, maybe that business doesn&amp;#x27;t really need that engineering department.&lt;p&gt;This is the hardest lesson to learn for fresh young engineers. Their job isn&amp;#x27;t to create wonderful new designs, it&amp;#x27;s to serve the needs of their company - which may involve creating wonderful new designs, if they&amp;#x27;re lucky, but it may not.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Longflow Manifesto</title><url>https://github.com/Nax/longflow-manifesto/blob/master/README.md</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AbrahamParangi</author><text>No offense intended to the author, but it sounds like they&amp;#x27;ve mistaken the purpose of their job. For most engineers, their job is &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; to produce exceptionally wonderful engineering.&lt;p&gt;It is to produce whatever god-forsaken clusterfuck is required to get the product out before the holiday rush. Or more generally to do whatever the business needs to do in order to keep making enough money to continue existing.&lt;p&gt;If engineering doesn&amp;#x27;t directly serve business goals, maybe that business doesn&amp;#x27;t really need that engineering department.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>parenthephobia</author><text>Producing whatever god-forsaken clusterfuck is required to get the product out before the holiday rush only serves business goals in a very unlucky or very badly run business.&lt;p&gt;A properly run business cares about selling products tomorrow but also cares about selling products next year. A properly run business therefore invests time in quality engineering so that the products they build now still work next year, or can be easily modified to fit whatever next year&amp;#x27;s requirements are.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s just good sense. Rushing out a horrible bodge job is only okay if you don&amp;#x27;t plan to be in business &lt;i&gt;after&lt;/i&gt; the holiday rush, or at least not the same business. Otherwise, if you&amp;#x27;re doing the minimum viable work to keep the company ticking over from day to day, you&amp;#x27;ll usually find that the quickest way to do it today makes for more work tomorrow when you have to undo whatever horrible kludge made it work.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a quote I like from Dave Thomas, one of the original codifiers of &amp;quot;Agile&amp;quot;: &lt;i&gt;When faced with two or more alternatives that deliver roughly the same value, take the path that makes future change easier.&lt;/i&gt;</text></comment>