Comment by godelski

I think your model has faulty assumptions. It makes the assumptions that the companies and managers actually know what the business objectives are. Or rather, what the business objectives that will make money are. I think we all have seen examples where maybe an afternoon's worth of work could fix some feature that is frustrating users, but since there's not a clear "value" ascribed to it, it gets pushed off. While simultaneously we've seen tons of money dumped into things neither users nor investors want and that end up failing.

If we're handed an engineer title, I think we should be engineers. Which requires you to be a bit "grumpy". That is because the job of an engineer is to find problems and then fix them. I say "grumpy" because it is your job to find friction in a system and remove it. What I've often seen though is that acknowledging friction is interpreted as rejection and not as part of the process to make things better. Unless we get to the magic land of perfection, the job of identifying issues and improving will always be extremely valuable and naturally lead to increased revenue[0]. There's a lot of things that go into making a product "good" and this can't be entirely done from technical skills, but it is a critical aspect. Look at Steve Job's Apple. The genius was the mixture of form and function. You make computers that are powerful, have good software, AND the UI/UX is far from a second thought. Good UI/UX and shitty code don't make a good product, similarly neither does shitty UI/UX and impressive code (backend devs don't rule the world)

  > The best web dev is the one that can convince their manager that their business objectives can be achieved by using WordPress.

Seems like your developer is a manager. This has perverse incentives and I don't think this is the right way to frame things. As an example, in law you wouldn't want a lawyer to win just because they were better at arguing. Obviously this happens and a charismatic lawyer can win despite the facts not being in their favor, but I think we all can agree that this is not what we want a justice system to look like. We want facts and the law to matter more while a lawyer's charisma (or lack of) is an unavoidable fact of life. Just a limit in the underlying mechanisms in which we communicate. Every job has politics and you can't get rid of them, but you don't want politics to rule the job. That wouldn't create the most value for the company, though it might for a person at that company.

[0] Obviously you have to weigh the costs that it takes to fix things. But identification is often cheap and easy. At least the first step of identification anyways.