The Product-Minded Software Engineer
There is a con to being a product minded software engineer. When you are in organizations that do checkbox driven development (i.e. build features so it looks like your product has the widest feature set), it can be disheartening. You will ask why build this? and will get a believable answer. However, once it get's built you will notice that no one pays attention to the feature (no analytics, no reports, no iteration, etc.). At some point in the future, maybe a year or two down the line, you will notice a huge bug raised with the feature. Whoops for 20% of the users, it didn't work. You feel bad at first for your bug, but then realize, that no users even noticed the feature gone. Your suspicions that you were building something that didn't even matter are confirmed.<p>This has happened to me a lot. I was on a team that was on one of the "most important" projects to the company. We had the CTOs daily  attention. You felt important and we had a large team who worked hard to ship it in one year. It was deemed a success by the CEO and myself and many of the team members got staffed on other teams (basically the next highest priority project for the company). Some other engineers got put on legacy duty for maintaining the project. After a year, I barely heard about the project (we had so many new projects) but we still maintained it and it was still on our website. 1.5 years later, I get a p2 bug that basically shows the whole product had stopped working for 3 months due to a front end bug. I got pulled to fix the bug and worked hard to find it and fix, but at the end I was demoralized because I realized my team had wasted a year on a feature no customer cared about enough to complain until 3 months after it stopped working.<p>Basically, it can be really demoralizing to be product minded engineer if your organization is not. This happened in an org that heavily talked the talk about product market fit and testing, but the truth was we were checkbox driven. We just wanted the widest feature set among competitors (even if they didn't always work).