I’ve been following courses at my university about software engineering… but seeing what is happening on the work daily base… well, there is a huge difference. Particularly when your target is the internet. Scalability is not only a so called “non functional requirement”, it is a key feature that can lead the whole business case of your project to miserably fail.
I’ve been in charge of the load and performance testing activities, of different software projects, for the last 2 years and a half… plus I’ve been working as technical architect as well in the mean time, getting nagios and the online probing of mobile internet services to a new level. I’m going to change company in the next 2 weeks. Excited and positively scared about the new upcoming challenges. Stay tuned. 🙂
Guido Maria Serra 
Well, of course requirements change with respect to the field in which you are working, but anyway if your software is poor engineered, then adding functionalities after a few releases will mess up your code and create unmaintainable software.
So, it is better to take a little time to engineer your code well, whether you are developing web apps or desktop apps or whatever 🙂
@Siv: in a corporation there is no one-person-in-charge… which can just say, “hey, let’s re-engineer the code”… it should be… I agree on that 🙂
but here I’m talking about what happens in real life… in a corporation… not at university, or in a small company where there is a clear responsibility on the deliverables