A blog is often like an interior monologue. I feel I need to put a few things down, even if its just so I can read it over a year down the line and see how naive I was/still am.A pretty good measure of success is profit. Be that profit, money, time, love(?). If you get lots of something good back from what you do, it means you’re doing well. (Stay with me…)
Software engineers, are engineers, do they always look for the most ‘profit’?
Or are they better at solving problems?
Sometimes software engineers build software to make money, sometimes to streamline a process, sometimes just because they can’t be sacked. Making money is where the real test lays, you have to be clever and smart to make money, they aren’t the same thing. Engineers are generally clever, they can deal with complicated ideas/concepts, simplify solutions, but are they as smart? Do they understand the factors that make a solution “killer”.
Often, I feel, it is the last mile that lets most development down, lots of hard work goes into developing a solution/product, and to quote Jurassic Park “They were so busy wondering if they could, they didn’t stop to consider whether or not they should.” Feature creep, software bloating, and parts of the solution that only the person that wrote the code understand appear. The pricing model gets looked at by one person, whilst the code was looked at by 60, no one thinks to get some customers, but the solutions great right? Only in your head. Agile software development helps here, as the customer should drive the product, but far, far to often the customer is never there, the developer self diagnoses and the result isn’t so great.So, the proof isn’t in the pudding, it’s in the profit.