I'd argue that "engineering culture", or to be more frank, a culture that is dominated by engineers, not accountants or marketeers, requires a time when building new products can bring massive amount of profit.
Capital doesn't really care what brings profit. If killing people brings more profit, it happily embraces that. If building new products brings more profit, it happily embraces that, too. It is beyond good or evil.
So to make an "engineering culture", you have to bring a lot of profit by building new products, not by selling services or shaking the greasing hands of some shady government officials. That also means, "engineering culture" almost surely dies when the company becomes too big.
> Capital doesn't really care what brings profit. If killing people brings more profit, it happily embraces that. If building new products brings more profit, it happily embraces that, too. It is beyond good or evil.
> A software consultancy charges its client around a million euros to develop the MVP of a project—a web and mobile application consisting of just three components—over a period of six months. The catch? The scope of work is so simple that I estimate it could be completed in just three weeks.
I think the standard answer to this is: then do it. Bid €800k and win, over and over again.
I enjoy programming, but if I had the sort of inherited wealth that brought in the equivalent of my compensation, would I be programming? Maybe less. There seems to be a wide debatable space between "a living wage" and "greed".
Capital doesn't really care what brings profit. If killing people brings more profit, it happily embraces that. If building new products brings more profit, it happily embraces that, too. It is beyond good or evil.
So to make an "engineering culture", you have to bring a lot of profit by building new products, not by selling services or shaking the greasing hands of some shady government officials. That also means, "engineering culture" almost surely dies when the company becomes too big.