Prestige of Engineers

sakky
Tue, 22 Jan 2008 14:03:12 +0000

Greater good is where you find it, although I will admit that sometimes you have to look pretty hard.



And sometimes you’ll never find it because there is no greater good to be found.

For example, I fail to see the greater good in, say, Microsoft engineers modifying software to specifically breaking compatibility with other products or deliberately inserting fake error messages so that other products appear to be incompatible.

[Microsoft emails focus on DR-DOS threat | CNET News.com](CNET: Product reviews, advice, how-tos and the latest news)

Similarly, a lot of product development and engineering is performed for purely strategic reasons to, as economists would say, extract greater customer surplus. For example, the IBM Laser Printer Series E was a low-end version of the the regular IBM Laser Printer, for the Series E only printed at half the speed. What customers didn’t realize is that the Series E didn’t cost IBM less to manufacture than the regular printer. In fact, it actually cost more. IBM took the exact same regular printer and had the engineering team deliberately insert extra wait states into the controlling algorithm in order to *slow down the printing. * In other words, IBM engineers were assigned to deliberately make a product perform worse. That makes sense from a strategic standpoint (because IBM wanted to sell to 2 different customer bases with 2 different price points), but I’m not sure that any engineer would feel proud about taking a good printer and deliberately trying to make it perform worse just for strategic purposes. Similarly mathematics and statistical software applications companies have often times sold “Student” versions of their software which used the exact same code base as their “Professional” versions but with certain function calls deliberately disabled in order to make the Student version slower and less capable. How much professional pride would you feel if you were assigned a project to make a good product worse?