I'm not sure I totally agree with measuring value by avoiding landmines or anything at all related to project management, but it definitely bugs me to see everything reduced to business impact. There are plenty of things in life that matter to individuals, to humanity, to the entire world at large, that have nothing to do with selling products for money. When I think of the engineers I revere the most, I don't think of titans of post-2001 Silicon Valley so much as John von Neumann, Robert Oppenheimer, Nikola Tesla, Leonardo DaVinci, whoever the hell built the Roman aqueducts and Egyptian pyramids, Babylonians and Mesoamericans who figured out how to predict eclipses.
Did these people have a business impact? I guess Tesla made Westinghouse a lot of money at one point, but that seems far from the most distinguishing thing that made him great at what he did. If anything, he was mediocre at business.
Even if we want to look at current titans of the computing industry, I admire the work done by orgs like Nvidia or humans like Geoff Hinton, but they also just got lucky that what they were doing for completely different reasons ended up benefiting so tremendously from the galaxy-scale data harvesting that has been going on due to the Internet becoming primarily ad-monetized, which they didn't know was going to happen. How many equally great engineers toiled in obscurity on dead ends but did equally great work? Doug Lenat was just as great an AI engineer, if not better, than Geoff Hinton. History just went one way and not the other, due to factors completely outside of the control of either of them.
Did these people have a business impact? I guess Tesla made Westinghouse a lot of money at one point, but that seems far from the most distinguishing thing that made him great at what he did. If anything, he was mediocre at business.
Even if we want to look at current titans of the computing industry, I admire the work done by orgs like Nvidia or humans like Geoff Hinton, but they also just got lucky that what they were doing for completely different reasons ended up benefiting so tremendously from the galaxy-scale data harvesting that has been going on due to the Internet becoming primarily ad-monetized, which they didn't know was going to happen. How many equally great engineers toiled in obscurity on dead ends but did equally great work? Doug Lenat was just as great an AI engineer, if not better, than Geoff Hinton. History just went one way and not the other, due to factors completely outside of the control of either of them.