It’s been 14 years since Seth Godin wrote who cares? and yet it remains as relevant today as it was then.
Since the original blog post, we’ve got AI, we’ve got vibe coding, vibe marketing and all kinds of crazy automation.
The world builds things faster than ever before, but a lot of these products feel unpolished.
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Sometimes, it’s the chatbot that responds in a friendly manner but it’s clear it doesn’t understand the product.
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Sometimes, it’s the very obvious bug in the middle of a core feature that makes you question the entire quality of the product.
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Sometimes, it’s the marketing website that promises the world but fails to deliver.
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Sometimes, it’s the engineering team that is trying to close a ticket as fast as possible without thinking about the future.
None of these are done on purpose. None of these are malicious.
More often than not, they are the result of misaligned incentives.
In my experience, spending the extra time to polish a feature has always came with a reward.
It’s not immediate, but over time it led to many promotions, a lot of adventures with different companies and a solid reputation to build upon. Other people had similar experiences. Patrick McKenzie wrote a blog post about how writing code if often the easiest part of the job, it’s everything else that makes you valuable. It’s the communication, the attention to details and the understanding of the core business that gets you to the level of “normal engineer” that everybody loves.
One caveat: incentives shape behavior.
If your company rewards output over outcomes people might end up in a situation where they are solving for endless edge cases that may never happen in real life. You can’t think your way to a perfect product, you have to build it, ship it and learn from your users. As Seth Godin puts it: “Caring, it turns out, is a competitive advantage, and one that takes effort, not money”.