this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2025
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It's really a more general problem with Western culture around engineering. Restriction maximizing engineering makes the world shitty. Engineers think they have an obligation to make any product do the absolute minimum that stat still meet spec. That is not to reduce cost or design difficulty by coming in just at spec, but to actively try to make things as shitty as possible using significant effort to do so just so the thing can do only the minimum thing that can be said to do the thing at all. It actually takes effort to make this happen.
The end result really sucks. Because this is so costly and everything is layered maximal minimalism this means that if you want to scale anything up at all the cost to do so is insane if western engineers are involved. This is a significant reason why China gets the manufacturing work and western engineers don't. They are yes men. Yes we can build that. And they have a network of yes men behind them that can help them execute on anything. And because they don't waste time engineering restriction every product and sub-product is adaptable.
But the western engineer only knows one mode of thinking. "We need to isolate the regimes that this product may operate in." Sometimes that's true but it shouldn't be everything we think about.
As a Western engineer, it's not engineering, it's management culture you have a problem with. Most engineers I meet want to make their product the best they can, but management actively cracks down on and sabotages these efforts for various reasons, none of them having to do with engineers.
They think that making something worse always takes less time and effort, so if you made something that is more than the bare minimum, they think you've wasted their budget.
Also, they don't care about making a good product, they care about their careers, so if someone else had a good idea, they are incentivised to sabotage it because it either draws time and attention away from the things that would get them promoted. If you think that your new thing could make their work easier as well, and your interests are aligned, see my previous point.
Finally, with customer-facing products, there is also the fact that your better solution might make some bullshit monetisation strategy obsolete.
We're alienated as fuck from our work, don't point at us mate.
i think people are accountable for the systems they participate in, as involved or not as you actually feel.
people are valid in being upset with doctors, engineers, etc. for systemic things. i certainly know i get pissed with the doctor here in the US sometimes. if the whole system you work in is rotten people are gonna get mad about your hand in it, as rational or not as it is, and i don’t think there’s anything wrong or unreasonable about that tbh.
i don’t feel the need to abscond my responsibility in my work by pointing to others that may be involved… it’s how we end up here and now where no one can ever be held accountable for anything.
don’t get me wrong, you’re right that it’s probably more a managerial problem than not. management is just, like it or not, at least in the West; an intrinsic part of our engineering and design process, and thus we are accountable for the effects it has on our product.
Software engineers, at least in my experience, tend to do things right as much as they can, and then quit when their work gets sabotaged, but they get rehired elsewhere because there are still jobs available, and that's how they become "job hoppers".
I worked in IT for a hospital subcontractor, and I got my team of engineers to cut down time for the main thing we did from a 4 day turnover to one where it could be done in 20 minutes, with much fewer problems and errors as well.
My team got laid off immediately after this, and our new systems canned, as the new CTO would rather outsource the existing error-prone 4 day process to India as he could take credit for that.
What I'm saying is that most of my peers feel our responsibility and try to act on it, but those of my peers that don't tend to have longer tenures and less stressful lives.
That's not true. If you want to know what's wrong with most of the products you buy, most of the services you use, most of the economy in general, it's Wall Street and the stock market. That is all there is to it.