… I appreciate her sentiment at the end there that we should try to change the status quo (which I think does suck), but I'm not sure how much power the average employee has over it. Most employers I've worked at seem loathe to retain anyone past about 2 years. (E.g., currently I'm in the 95'th percentile, after just over 2 years.) IME it takes about 6 months to really learn how a company's systems work to where to proficiency (yes, six months.) which means we're spending ~25% of the time "training", where "training" is usually someone trying something crazy and failing, and getting corrected as opposed to some structured form of learning. Oftentimes the systems that these engineers are stumbling I think are the internal ones; they need more features, or refactoring to account for organic growth, but since they're not shiny new customer facing features they'll get exactly 0 priority from PMs. The engineers who build experience working with these systems and actually know what needs to change and how without breaking the existing use cases … are about to leave the company, since nobody is retained beyond ~2 years.
I also find my own team is usually strapped for resources, normally, people. (Usually politely phrased as "time".) Yes, one has to be wary of mythical man-month'ing it, but like my at my last employ we had essentially 2 of us on a project that could have easily used at least one, if not two more people. Repeat across every project and that employer was understaffed by 50-100%, essentially.
Some company just went for S-1, and they were bleeding cash. But they weren't bleeding it into new ventures: they were bleeding it into marketing. Sure, that might win you one or two customers, but I think you'd make much stronger gains with new products, or less buggy products that don't drive the existing customers away.
Also there's an obsession with "NIT" — not invented there — that really ties my hands as an engineer. Like, everything has to be out sourced to some cloud vendor provider whose product only fits some of the needs and barely, and whose "support" department appears to be unaware of what a computer is. I'm a SWE, let me do my thing, once in a while? (Yes, where there's a good fit for an external product, yes, by all means. But these days my job is 100% support tickets, and like 3% actual engineering.)
I also find my own team is usually strapped for resources, normally, people. (Usually politely phrased as "time".) Yes, one has to be wary of mythical man-month'ing it, but like my at my last employ we had essentially 2 of us on a project that could have easily used at least one, if not two more people. Repeat across every project and that employer was understaffed by 50-100%, essentially.
Some company just went for S-1, and they were bleeding cash. But they weren't bleeding it into new ventures: they were bleeding it into marketing. Sure, that might win you one or two customers, but I think you'd make much stronger gains with new products, or less buggy products that don't drive the existing customers away.
Also there's an obsession with "NIT" — not invented there — that really ties my hands as an engineer. Like, everything has to be out sourced to some cloud vendor provider whose product only fits some of the needs and barely, and whose "support" department appears to be unaware of what a computer is. I'm a SWE, let me do my thing, once in a while? (Yes, where there's a good fit for an external product, yes, by all means. But these days my job is 100% support tickets, and like 3% actual engineering.)