Comment by YZF
5 years ago
For sure. In that context, the engineer that got the product to work before the startup ran out of money and shut down by deciding to hack around some issues rather than "do it properly" is the more productive engineer. Another way to think about this is the engineer that better optimizes the expected present value (sure, there might be a pretty wide distribution of outcomes). At the very least I feel like this business/economic context is very important, and often ignored. Without it it's very hard to say because in a different context the engineer that creates the very same hack maybe just cost the company a lot of $'s in future maintenance work.
My point is more about the possibility that a big chunk of future cash flow is entirely independent of engineering work, at least for some reasonable bounds for what constitutes "engineering work" (e.g. you could argue that an engineer ought to judge whether their time is better spent cold calling potential clients or finding office space to rent, but those I would call "out of bounds"). Any easy example to illustrate this would be two engineers who each develop a functionally identical app for two different startups, but at one startup the founder later embezzles company funds, gets arrested, and the whole company falls apart, while the other company goes on to be successful. Was one engineer really more productive than the other in any meaningful sense?
That is a good point. I guess for the purpose of this definition we need to make some more assumptions. But decoupling software development from the business completely is going too far the other way.