The best engineers think like investors, not builders

Isn't this thinking more like a business-person/founder than an investor?

With investors, you have multiple times...those who trade, those who invest for the long run, etc.

With people who do business, it's all about ROI.

I think that you are mixing engineering with entrepreneurship. Many devs of the WBE Space want to build their products and for them, I totally agree with your thesis. They must think like a businessman and see tech as a way to enable their product.

However, as a pure engineer, you are there to solve problems in the best way possible and not to think about money. Your manager will ask you to build a user signup and you should implement it to the best of your engineering capabilities.

These questions act as decision filters. After you define your goals with you startup, you should develop a set of such questions to assist you in evaluating nearly everything you do, questions designed to guide you to actions that promote your goals, and dissuade you from actions that detract from your goals.

In this case, stop yourself and think: This thing I am considering on embarking upon / approving, what goal will it achieve? Where will we be once it's completed? What are the opportunity costs?

Is that goal even desirable, given our resources? Or, can we do better? What might better look like? What is an easier win?

Programmers especially should be keenly aware to catch themselves falling into a comfortable slump (from a business viewpoint) of just sitting down and, you know, "doing a little more coding". Sure, adding a new feature / making a new library feels like the safe thing that will drive business forward. Often, it's not.

A very useful heuristic is the Five Whys, popularized in part by Toyota lore. Ask why would you do The Thing? Then regarding the answer, ask why that is desirable? Repeat questioning the why of the reasons that emerge, until you arrive at the root reasons. Approx five times, perhaps? :) At this point, you've reached clarify, and you can work forward to evaluate and decide what actions will lead you to your real goal.

Example: "So if what the customer really wants is to save time when doing their monthly expenses so they can get more family time, then why build an over-engineered, completely new service? Why not just offer a simple, tailored integration that completely automates the one step that consumes 90% of their time?"

This is a thought provoking post, I like the way you have put it across with great examples.

I have a development background and when people approached me with their idea, I always asked investor questions like "What is your target audience?" or "How big is the market?".

I did ask these kinds of questions because even though I didn't get asked for money, but for my time.

Most people with ideas simply zone out when asking investor-type questions. I have the impression there are a lot of people with shallow tech knowledge who simply want to steal your time by pushing you into a discussion.

One more thing, you do realize the world move forward without the rich and famous inventors we all know right?

I know someone who made telephone accessible to almost everyone on the planet by reduce the cost by 99%. He also made those cheap watch accessible to almost everyone. He pretty much help built Taiwan's semiconductor industry. He was named the top 5 most influential person (for Taiwan's tech industry) that no one knows about. He did that not for the money nor the fame. It was just the right thing to do.

I think there are people like that: That we feel with great knowledge, we have greater responsibility to society.

I see what you're getting at. I agree that learning the business side of things is helpful for engineers. And the three questions that you mentioned are good ones to ask.

But in general, I think it's more important for engineers to be builders. Builders build things worth building. And I'd rather have a great product that makes some money than a meh product that makes a lot of money.

I really like the visualizations of short term cost/investment (debt) for long term reward (profit). That definitely relates to investors.

There's a lot to take in so I'll probably make few separate comments.

Regarding migration, it depends on your definition of migrations. I had a discussion on the maturity of architecture. When a product is being rewritten 4-5 times, it better be mature enough. There are things that absolutely cannot be re-written, and there are things that definitely could do better at the first few iterations (after commercialization). So engineering management needs to plan accordingly to add those re-architecture/migration work in the development plan for many iterations and years to come. Product management probably have no idea this went on (mainly due to them lack engineering experience).

Second, the rewards of any migration must exceed the cost of the work. It doesn’t make sense to spend two years to save two years. You might as well not do the migration at all then.

You read my mind. I'm working at a company right now that, I'm not joking, worked on migrating customers to the new platform for 2 YEARS. Yes, you read that right, it took them 2 years to get them onto the new platform they invested millions to build.

And what was the result of this? The customers were glad for the new platform, but they've been slow to adopt all the new features that came with the platform. Instead of being interested in the new features, they are trying to figure out how they can do what they were doing before with the new tool.

It's a nightmare. And I'm sure the company is dissatisfied by it too, especially the engineers who were tasked with making sure it went smoothly, it was a massive technical undertaking that caused plenty of tiring headaches. All this to say, migrations are probably not worth the effort.