Comment by lewisl9029 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lewisl9029 | Hacker News Reader

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This reminds me of an epiphany I had at my first programming job at a major bank:

If you want to work in software, try to go for companies whose main product is software.

These are the companies that will take software quality seriously because their bottom line depends on it.

These are the companies that will constantly try to improve their craft by exploring new technologies because it helps them maintain their competitive advantage.

These are the companies that will truly value talented software engineers because they have the potential to make a positive impact in the products that define the company.

If the company's focus is on anything other than software, whatever you're working on becomes a means to another, more important end. Your work then becomes that much less valuable, and you, that much more replaceable, to the company because they're only looking for the bare minimum functionality out of the software you develop to enable whatever it is the company does that really brings home the bacon.

I realize this is probably an over-generalization, and exceptions will definitely exist, but so far from my experiences in job searching, this seems to hold in an overwhelming majority of cases.

>If you want to work in software, try to go for companies whose main product is software.

I used to think this before I worked at a software company. The problem is software companies have far more time pressure, particularly small and medium sized companies. "We'll go out of business if we miss this deadline" doesn't result in high quality code.

The best code I've seen was written for a telecom. The company had the resources and the patience to do it right, and (more importantly) the people in charge knew what they were doing.

I agree. A large business that uses software for a core revenue-producing source, is capable of doing fantastic work on that source.

A software company providing that same product as a vendor, would be unlikely to have the motivation and focus to do it the same way.

Key for me, is the principal/agent distinction. If you are using something as principal, for revenue, your motivations are very strong. If you are producing it as agent, for someone else's revenue, trickier. By definition, less money for you to get it right as agent for someone else.

That said, there may be dozens to hundreds of ancillary software processes at a large business which are done very poorly, but any smart business of size will take great care of where the money comes from.

I'd think the problem you're seeing has more to do with the size and available resources of the company rather than the sector it operates in. Any company in its early stage growth period has to prioritize time to market over most other priorities, but this is true for startups in all sectors and not limited to software.

Comparing an established telecom with a predictable revenue stream versus a software startup doesn't exactly make for a fair comparison.

If you instead keep the size and available resources at least somewhat consistent, and look at software written for say a large telecom vs a large software company, or say a software startup vs a hardware startup, for instance, I think the tendencies I outlined in the original post will still hold in an overwhelming majority of cases.

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