above you in theā¦
Iād like it if everybody who works on Electron against their will (or uses stuff like XML or Java against their will, or is pushed intoā¦
Ultimately, when youāre in a business context, you need to please the people above you in the hierarchy. That often means making technical decisions you know are bad for historical or political reasons. For instance, if everybody working under you only knows about the web stack, youāre going to need to convince a non-technical manager at some point that broadening their horizons & shifting focus is justifiable in terms of short term return on investment (a hard sell) or youāre going to need to put up with it. We donāt always have the resources necessary to stand firm on this stuff, and we have to pick our battles.
Iād like it if everybody who works on Electron against their will (or uses stuff like XML or Java against their will, or is pushed into using Hadoop to do what could be done faster on a single machine in a single thread) stood up and said āIād rather be fired than make our customers and coworkers pay for this obvious mistakeā, but the truth is a lot of them would get fired if they did that (or at least get shortlisted for layoffs or get a couple black marks on their record) and while software engineers are more capable of absorbing that risk than many other occupations, I understand why people would be nervous.
(Software engineers arenāt really unionized, and even if we were, unions rarely strike over treatment of customers.)
By John Ohno on May 2, 2018.
[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/ultimately-when-youre-in-a- business-context-you-need-to-please-the-people-above-you-in-the-378df601fe8c)
Exported from Medium on September 18, 2020.