The Tech Industry Is Built to Produce Technologists, Not Product Engineers
Trapped in the Technologist Factory
A developer recounts stints at two startups that never found a working business model. At Runa, engineers hoarded promising tools like Clojure and HBase while waiting for growth that never came; at Factual, a geographic data product quietly became an adtech company. His conclusion: venture-backed startups reward engineers who abstract and generalize, yet companies usually fail by building the wrong thing — which calls for product engineers instead.
And so we continue to search for our keys under the streetlamp; they could be anywhere, but this is where the light is.