alt Hacker News> The engineer knows the tech but doesn’t really understand what it takes to keep the business afloat.
This is assuming there IS a way to keep the business afloat. It's this framing of thinking that has caused more suffering, frustration, and bad will in all the places I've worked at which are just reskins of this article.
A business is entitled to it's model but it is not entitled to success. This story which is more than just a strawman or anecdote gets it right: The engineers are doing their job the best they can with unreasonable expectations set by people who do not feel they need to be constrained by reality and just have dollar signs in their eyes. The engineers do not share the same type of blame as everyone else at the company. Their failure was enabling nonsense and greed.
Yep. I've worked at a couple startups where engineering built a thing, sales was able to sell it but had to give a huge discount. The resulting economics just didn't work. But, each sale was seen on its own as a success even though the generally lost money. Often there was a discount plus some promised bespoke feature that required additional development to close the sale. There was never enough volume and often that additional engineering work never applied to another customer. Nobody wants to say "maybe this deal just isn't worth making" and move on.
In a couple of these cases, the company was ultimately sold in a fire sale. The early investors, founders, and employees got nothing. The acquisition is still celebrated as a "success", of course.