Your Code is a Beautiful, Expensive Paperweight

Software engineers are the worst people to build profitable products.

Myself included.

We fall in love with the solution, not the problem. We obsess over elegant architecture for a skyscraper when the customer just needs a tent. We build Ferraris for people who need to haul lumber.

I once blew three months building a technically brilliant, real-time notification system with Redis queues and websockets. It was a work of art. The code was clean, deploy was a single command, latency was nonexistent.

It was also completely and utterly useless.

Our users didn't want real-time alerts. They wanted a damn weekly email summary. I built a masterpiece of engineering for a problem that didn't exist.

The addiction is the craft. We get a dopamine hit from solving a complex technical puzzle, not from solving a customer's boring, simple pain. The shinier the tech, the more complex the system, the bigger the hit. Its a drug. But we're building beautiful, intricate solutions that sit on a shelf and collect dust.

The way out is painful for the engineering ego.

Stop starting with the tech stack.
Stop drawing system diagrams. Stop worrying about scalability for your first ten users.

Just talk to a human.

Find their actual, painful, boring problem. The one they'd happily pay money to make disappear. Then, and only then, build the ugliest, simplest, most duct-taped thing that solves that one specific pain.

It will hurt. Your inner craftsman will scream. But you’ll be building something people actually want.

This article was originally published on https://craftengineer.com/. It was written by a human and polished using grammar tools for clarity.

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