Comment by joe_the_user
2 years ago
The classic story is how pg created a storefront in lisp that he sold to yahoo. Yahoo couldn't hire lisp programmers and rewrote it in another language (c++?) and it wasn't as good. But the decision still made sense from a business perspective.
And this article sadly shows why. Objectively, they aren't fair to "Goody engineers". Often, they mean opinionated engineers. Now opinionated engineers can be good and bad for profits - they work hard and point maybe good direction and maybe bad directions. But they make the company harder to sell and that objectively reduces the stock price and so it's bad from the "economic standpoint" even if it makes profits somewhat higher.
The problem is not with opinionated engineers. (Almost every engineer I know is opinionated; the ones who are not tend not to be very good.) The problem is with engineers who are excessively opinionated about the wrong things. Having opinions about the product is way more valuable than being obsessed with writing the umpteenth JSON parsing library in Gooby because the others aren’t built exactly the way you’d build it.
> Having opinions about the product is way more valuable
Be careful with this statement: many programmers value very different properties of the product than the typical customer.
Reminds me also of Figma converting all of their custom language stuff into Typescript, even though Typescript is slower.