> If you let that culture fail you’ll end up like a post-2010 PayPal, a Pandora, a LinkedIn, a Dell, a GM, a 2000’s era Microsoft.
Having LinkedIn in this list seems a bit unfair. Yes I'm sure they have a lot of non-engineer employees (they're making money and need salespeople, how dare they!) but something like Kafka doesn't come out of a company with no engineering culture.
That's fair. I just find myself begging for an alternative. No other service I use ships with as many huge bugs. Feels like the only customer they care about are recruiters.
Further, I think it would be absurd to suggest that there aren't brilliant engineers working at those companies. They've created awesome things that are only loosely related to their product. But I can hear the whip cracking from outside, and the compromise bleeds through into their products in the form of bugs, poor UX, and failure to iterate or innovate.
Having LinkedIn in this list seems a bit unfair. Yes I'm sure they have a lot of non-engineer employees (they're making money and need salespeople, how dare they!) but something like Kafka doesn't come out of a company with no engineering culture.