alt Hacker NewsAn engineer's job is to add the features that management asks to be added. Engineers who fight with management decisions on adding features to a product are almost always exactly the ones who care a lot about the product - the path of last resistance is to just do what you're asked, since that's what you're paid for.
Management wants to add Google ads to their premium offline app? Sure, they'll work to add that, who cares. Whether they spend two months building this feature or another, they're getting paid the same amount.
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An engineer's job is also to use their technical judgment and choose the right tool for the job. Some of the worst engineering jobs I've had were the ones where engineering is handed inadequate tools and told to use them.
That’s not how software engineering works. Management doesn’t know what a feature will cost to add so they defer to engineers who produce estimates which are used to forecast and plan. Engineers estimate based on their own preferences (whether for cynical self-serving reasons or not). You estimate a feature will be delivered in 2 months but it takes 4, that’s 4 months of pressure you could have avoided by rejecting the feature.
Some features are annoying to work on, some have long term implications for how much and what type of work will need to be done. Some just don’t fit with what the engineers want to work on. I know which features are going to take endless stakeholder meetings and which aren’t. I know which are going to require overtime and being on-call. I know which are going to kill off my pet project.
The most self-serving action a software engineer who doesn’t want to work more than the bare minimum can take is to reject as much as possible as being too difficult or bad or some other excuse.
> An engineer's job is to add the features that management asks to be added.
I get the context here (you are talking about software engineers, fine, and adding silly chat features, which is pretty low stakes). But, still, want to mention the general case:
The engineer’s professional obligation is to push back against the company if they are asked to design something impossible (and try to find some alternative that fits the customer’s business need if that’s possible), and to refuse or possible whistle-blow if asked to do something unethical/harmful to society.
We live in a very corporatized society where professions are being turned into jobs left and right. But, the engineer’s job is to just implement management’s requests in the same way that the doctor just exists as a conduit to your insurance company: that’s the way the company would like it.