I used to think working software was the finish line.
I started at Infosys as a systems engineer believing that if you build the thing correctly, people will use it. One project cured me: a system that passed every test and met every requirement — and a few months after go-live, usage was close to nothing. The client’s staff had quietly gone back to their spreadsheets. Nobody had even complained, which was somehow the worst part.
A bug, you can fix. This was a different kind of failure, and it didn’t show up in any log we had.
So I switched sides. I’ve spent the last two and a half years in business development for an IT services and consulting firm, sitting in the meetings where these decisions actually get made and paid for. The suspicion I’d had as an engineer turned out to be true, just bigger than I thought: the rare skill in this industry isn’t building technology, and honestly it isn’t selling it either. It’s carrying an idea between those two groups without dropping it.