Recently Paul M. Jones published great article on the Software Engineering major conflict between Business and Software worlds: Product quality that perfectly matches Robert L.Glass book I’ve been recently reading on “Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering”. If you still didn’t read it - strongly recommended!

Just few excerpts on the article:

They [engineers] have a reputation to maintain. Low quality for their kind of work is bad for reputation among their peers. (Note that their peers are not necessarily their employers.)

They understand they may be working on the same project later; higher quality means easier work later, although at the expense of (harder? more?) work now.

And on the other side (dark side?..):

The reputation of the payer is not dependent on how the work is done, only that the work is done, and in a way that can be presented to customers. Note that the customers are mostly not the programmer’s peers.