The defense industry lost the ability to make weapons when crisis hit. The same pattern is eroding software engineering skills. The timelines are identical.
What you correctly observe as shortsightedness and unwilligness to make compromise are side effects created by our economic system. Competition for profit and capital literally creates the short horizons. If you don’t make the money for me this quarter, I’ll move my capital to your competitor who would. Your stock price falls and with it further falls the ability to raise capital to fund profit generating ventures and products. As a board and CEO you know that so you set appropriate quarterly profit targets and your exec layer cascades those down to concrete measures down to the junior devs. If your competitor introduces monthly profit targets and executes them consistently, you’d have to match as capital us going to start moving towards your competitor because your quartetly plans would look risky in comparison. Worse, when I say competitor, that’s any firm producing profit, not a firm in your product market. Basically any firm that takes capital from capital markets is in competition with you for capital.
My point being it’s not a culture or individual (group) behaviour thing, it’s structural systemic drive that can only be solved by structural systemic changes. It’s not a new occurrence either. It’s been moving in this direction for decades, it’s just gotten painfully obvious for most lately.
What you correctly observe as shortsightedness and unwilligness to make compromise are side effects created by our economic system. Competition for profit and capital literally creates the short horizons. If you don’t make the money for me this quarter, I’ll move my capital to your competitor who would. Your stock price falls and with it further falls the ability to raise capital to fund profit generating ventures and products. As a board and CEO you know that so you set appropriate quarterly profit targets and your exec layer cascades those down to concrete measures down to the junior devs. If your competitor introduces monthly profit targets and executes them consistently, you’d have to match as capital us going to start moving towards your competitor because your quartetly plans would look risky in comparison. Worse, when I say competitor, that’s any firm producing profit, not a firm in your product market. Basically any firm that takes capital from capital markets is in competition with you for capital.
My point being it’s not a culture or individual (group) behaviour thing, it’s structural systemic drive that can only be solved by structural systemic changes. It’s not a new occurrence either. It’s been moving in this direction for decades, it’s just gotten painfully obvious for most lately.