I will always be of the opinion that the engineers should be made to service their designs under field conditions.
Me too.
I've designed and implemented custom software for different kinds of needs, mostly to support the work my own team or organization does. Think of customized tools. Every time, instead of asking them what they
wanted, I talked and observed them when they went through a real-world workflow. I'm pretty good at it, too: I can usually tell how to make the process more robust (reduce the likelihood of errors), and save time and effort also.
Having done that successfully, making everyone really happy and productive, and then seeing how the Big Boys do the same, makes me
![Face Palm :palm:](https://www.eevblog.com/forum/Smileys/default/xfacepalm.gif.pagespeed.ic.EBDwh1hCfo.png)
and want to cry.
It's like the bad telephone game: someone rants a bit about what they want (without actually knowing or having any skill in deciding what they want), writing a report about it to their boss. The boss goes on a few paid wet lunches, to see which companies could "fix" the issue. Some dedicated people at those companies create some offers –– note that these people are not part of the actual development process, they're dedicated to writing tempting offers, and specialized in weasel-words. The boss, or someone the boss picks, selects one of the offers, based on metrics defined on a spreadsheet somewhere, completely unrelated to the thing at hand but designed by some analyst or bureaucrat somewhere. Then starts the design rounds, where the picked company selects a set of people to write up a description of the result. None of these people have ever used this kind of software, but they're very good at writing nice descriptions; that's what they get paid for. After a few rounds, the description is agreed upon, and a different set of people start developing software, using their own understanding of the description. None of them have any experience in using that kind of software, of course. The end result? Has nothing to do with what was needed to solve the original problem. Nobody takes responsibility, because everyone did their jobs
perfectly, even if millions were spent and the end result is not usable nor would it solve the problem even if it was. Some designer/architect/developer might get blamed and fired if some accountant or bureau generates noise about the wastage, but all the management types will get bonuses and happily move on to the next, even better paid job.
(In Finland, only about a third of large IT projects succeed, producing an usable result. The failures never seem to impact the leaders of such projects. A roughly similar project in Estonia that cost 20 M€ and was a success, cost an estimated 774 M€ (our population is about 5.5M, compared to Estonia's 1.3M) and is a complete unusable turd; see
here.)
Making unserviceable, unusable stuff should be a shame that impacts your career. Instead, it somehow seems to be something to be proud of. WTF?