“Engineering-Driven” Leads to “Engineering-Supremacy” (opens in new tab)

This is an interesting article. I would add one more example of engineering supremacy: when engineers engage in “not invented here” activities at a great opportunity cost to the company. If your IT department is building their own key-value store deflecting any scrutiny by appealing to their technical knowledge then that’s a problem.

What this piece doesn’t touch on is why engineers might get frustrated with sales and marketing. Often it’s not because they think they know better, but because the over-promising of salespeople is causing them hardship. Also developers can immediately tell when feature work is brought into scope not because it is profitable for the company to do so, but because it will help someone higher up or a PM with their next promotion or will be a nice item on their resume. Working on these features can be very disillusioning and breeds resentment towards the folks in other roles driving it