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"I think you want to seek out companies where the main business risk is technology risk still."

This is an excellent assessment. Any software product that depends on understanding deep first principles based complex systems has an ecological need to maintain a working engineering culture. At least in those parts of the organization that does product development.

I've worked my entire software engineer career in computer graphics and computer aided design (after getting my masters in physics) and while in these fields you've seen the usual MBA types poke their heads out, there have still been nooks where proper engineering was necessary.

So, find a company that seems to be needing internal development of non-trivial software.

But the original attention was correct as well - there are so many non-value adding bullshit jobs to keep things "professional" that they try to embrace all nooks an crannies, so even a healthy engineering culture is usually at risk, all the time.

> That said, I think product and businesspeople are often not aware that having really solid tech yields dividends for years to come and will help them outcompete any peer as well increase the acquisition likelihood.

This an incredibly inaccurate assertion. I'm not aware of a single business person would ever say, "I think we can win simply on positioning." [1] While people may not understand/appreciate the pressures or output of an engineering team, it is not to say that they don't recognize when the product stability is not there. It undermines the credibility in their statements and pitch.

[1] 10 years experience in Sales and Engineering at very small and medium sized businesses

We are talking about the difference between a functional engineering culture (or mediocre) and a great hackerculture-based culture.

In both cases, the product has to work and be stable however in a mediocre culture the cost of adding features goes up significantly over time, while if you have a really great team then the cost of adding features compresses or remains similar to the early stages.

This mostly comes down to good technology choices, unassuming code, fast tests, optimized developer flow and really solid architectural choices.

I was not talking about plain bad engineering cultures like no testing, modifying code in production, copy-paste development,...

> I think you want to seek out companies where the main business risk is technology risk still. That would be database companies, developer tools, artificial intelligence startups, operating systems, ...

This is only true for established companies. At early stages those still might not have a proper engineering culture, whicih makes them turn into pyramid schemes sellling the dream, getting hackier and scammier with each iteration.

Bio/Pharma/Ag tech companies are a nice mix of this. Their products tend to be high risk of failure, but the companies are 'established' and know how to work the regulatory environments.

Also, the smaller companies tend to need good software people that can take the excel/matlab models and turn them into something enterprise.

Totally agree. Quite a bit of the OP’s sentiment resonates with me. I’ve been at VMware the past 3 years and can honestly say, engineers regularly make most of the product decisions. Managers are basically just people managers and become tie breakers in debates. I also spent some time at a startup that had a very similar culture.

Find the right team for you, there are many good and bad fits.

Lots of business people don't look at long term, especially the CXOs unless they founded the business themselves. They usually stay for a few years and move on, so quick wins are not only preferred, but are essential to their next move.

If a company has a short-sight problem, you can be sure that it comes from the brain. Ordinary employees, once they are not juniors anymore, tend to stick with a company, because jumping around every couple of years don't really look good on the resumes.

Agreed. I worked at an insurance company early in my career and even though we were updating the company to the newest technology for all the internal apps and theoretically making everyone's lives easier, we were still just kind of a necessary evil because the company could have gone back to using paper if they needed to. I decided to move to companies where software was the focus and that worked very well. I got a lot better, worked with people more like me, and was appreciated a lot more by the companies I worked with.

A hardware focus provides a low pass filter to find engineering driven projects, at least for now. You should browse. One should probably browse https://hackaday.io/ every so often for inspiration.

> I think you want to seek out companies where the main business risk is technology risk still.

I like how you phrased that. In the past I've said that I want to work for a technical manager on tech product for a tech company, but that wasn't quite right.