It's always the MBAs. The organizational structure incentivises them on the wrong metrics. So they adapt and optimize for that. In real life, after a while, you hit a plateau with features and market demand. What these MBA clowns love to do is take what's already perfectly fine and mess it up and create a road map for it to fix something to being it the way it was, so they can justify to their higher ups they are "adding value" to the company. And half way through this, they leave the company. Now some other new employee comes in, has no idea why this had to be reworked and messes it up even more. You have this loop enough times, you end up with how software engineering works in the fortune 500.
The moment you hear "let's circle back" enough in meetings, that's your tell tale sign to quit the workplace infested with MBAs. A good organization is always run by engineers at the top level and engineers don't incentivise engineers simply for working on roadmaps of perfectly fine existing features. That's the difference.
Which company would you say is the example(s) of the latter? Sounds like utopia I'd like to be a part of.
They want to be Apple. Apple sells hardware, services, and takes a huge cut being a software store.
Microsoft sells software. They turned office into a service but it's still software. Nobody really wants to use their store. Their hardware is a cute little side hustle.
Microsoft's strategy for turning into Apple is kneecapping their own software.
> A good organization is always run by engineers at the top level and engineers don't incentivise engineers simply for working on roadmaps of perfectly fine existing features. That's the difference.
I wish this were true, but unfortunately, I've seen enough evidence otherwise to strongly disagree. MBAs weren't born evil, they were made that way in business school. The same corrupting process works on engineers and can happen outside of business school contexts (one common corrupting force is Hacker News comments). An MBA-brained engineer as a manager is orders of magnitude worse than a regular MBA.