There is a simple reason for the disconnect between ‘tech’ and the rest of the business that I’ve witnessed so often in my career.
It’s economics.
Code used to be expensive to write. It required skilled and intelligent humans, trained over months and years to become effective.
As software ate the world, the economics of supply and demand meant humans with those skills and experiences could command attractive salaries and perks.
It produced a perverse incentive - the more ‘special’ engineers were treated, the more (as humans naturally do) they adopted this mentality, seeing the work they were doing as important and valuable in and of itself.
Combined with the excesses of the ZIRP era, where money was cheap and the payday would come years down the line once you had scaled, it made complete sense that engineers were incentivised to focus on unlocking 10 dollars tomorrow rather than optimising for delivering a dollar today.
The problem was, this distorted what engineering is really about, which is navigating the trade-off space between these two polarities.
I know this because I was that engineer.
Stay tuned.