You seem to be bringing in piles of other things here: technical debt, complexity, cruft, etc. My post is about none of those things. You also note that the prevalence of those things is because no one will listen to engineers “with some deep skills & knowledge”. At some point, you also have to assign some responsibility for failure to communicate effectively, and not just a failure to listen. Or maybe they are not listening also, and not understanding the full context? I’m not doubting that poor decisions happen, but I’m not sure it’s useful to assign unilateral blame to management based on a failure to listen to the engineers you’ve deemed special here.
> You also note that the prevalence of those things is because no one will listen to engineers “with some deep skills & knowledge”. At some point, you also have to assign some responsibility for failure to communicate effectively, and not just a failure to listen. Or maybe they are not listening also, and not understanding the full context?
This rings immensely hollow to me, & borders on victim blaming. Oh sure; telling the lower rungs of the totem pole it's their fault for not convincing the business to care- for not being able to adequately tune in the business to the sea of deeper technical concerns- has some tiny kernel of truth to it. Maybe the every-person coder could do better, maybe, granted. But I see the structural issues & organization issues as vastly vastly more immense impediments to understanding-our-selves.
There is such a strong anti-elitism bias in society. We don't like know it alls, whether their disposition is classicaly braggadocious, or humble as a dove. We are intimidated by those who have real, deep, sincere & obvious masteries. We cannot outrun the unpleasantness of the alien, the foreign concerns, steeped in assurity & depth, that we can scarcely begin to grok. Techies face this regularly, are ostracized & distanced from with habit. Few, very few, are willing to sit at points of discomfort to trade with the alien, to work through what they are saying, to register their concerns.
> I’m not sure it’s useful to assign unilateral blame to management based on a failure to listen to the engineers
Again, granted! There absolutely are plenty of poor decisions all around. Engineers rarely have good sounding boards, good feedback, for a variety of reasons but the above forced alienation is definitely a sizable factor where engineers go wrong; being too alone in deciding, not knowing or not having people to turn to to figure shit out, to get not just superficial but critical review that strikes at the heart.
This again does not dissuade me from my core feelings on my core point. I think specifically most companies are hugely unable to assess their own products & systems health, unable to gauge the decay & rot within. Whether it's slog or real peril, there are few rangers tasked with scouting the terrain & identifying the features & failures. And the efforts are renewal/healing are all too often patchwork, haphazard, & random, done as emergency patches. These organisms of business are discorporated, lack cohesion & understanding of themselves & what they are. Having real on the ground truthfinders, truthtellers, assessers, monitors- having people close to the machine who can speak for the machine, for the systems, that is rarely a role we embrace, and so often we simply rely on the same chain of management which is also responsible for self/group-promotion & tasking & reporting which has far too many conflicted interests for it to be expectable for them to deliver these more unvarnished, technically minded views.
