6 ms·

Flipping this the other way - a company that works in a particular area, whether it's law, finance, retail, advertising, anything - it's important to educate en

by barrkel 10y ago

Flipping this the other way - a company that works in a particular area, whether it's law, finance, retail, advertising, anything - it's important to educate engineers about the specifics of that industry. The alternative is to forgo bottom-up innovation in the company (with engineers that don't have enough business context) and risk embedding a command and control approach to feature development (coming in from sales, through product management, into engineering design, all the way down to the interchangeable coding monkeys).

BurningFrog 10y ago
What's most important is that engineers have contact directly with users or their representatives and get a grasp of how and why their code is used in real life. The more this gets filtered through layers of communication and management, the worse the software will be to use. Making the programmers understand the subject area on their own also has a benefit, but it seems a far more costly way.
- tyingq 10y ago
  If the business side, specifically product management / direction is reasonably skilled, you're missing out on a lot not talking with them regularly. Talking directly with the users is fine. But if that is your sole input, something is probably broken.
  - BurningFrog 10y ago
    Yeah, that's what I mean by "or their representatives".
    - tyingq 10y ago
      Ah, okay. Took that to mean customer support or similar. Customers sometimes describe what they want, not what they need, what they would pay for, what might change things entirely, etc. There is some amount of product direction that is made without existing customer input.
      - BurningFrog 10y ago
        Yeah, representatives" is not the best word.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- ozim 10y ago
  I don't like to fix first line problems but I really like to watch how users are actually using what I have built. Some eye opening moments come from that.
- thirdsun 10y ago
  I couldn't agree more. As someone who develops internal applications in a non-tech company I consider it essential to have a different, non-developer perspective on the subject as well as direct, frequent communication with the the actual users of the product, which includes me. Potential problems and room for improvements are easily discoverable that way.
parennoob 10y ago
This. While I have come around to the concept of "It's probably better if more people learn to code", I rarely see other parts of the company so eager to share their knowledge. In particular, I'd like more training on law and finance. For some reason, I have never seen any lawyers or accountants being eager to teach me about interpreting laws, or balancing books.
- azernik 10y ago
  I'm not so sure every engineer needs to know that. I think the important thing is for everyone to have some understanding of the core business. If you're Stripe, that's coding, APIs, and finance/payments (that last is the bit engineers should be taught). If you're Google, that's ads and ad-buying - hence the company practice of giving engineers (and maybe other employees?) some free ad credits so they can see what the customer perspective looks like.
joatmon-snoo 10y ago
The company I was at this past summer took a few days where everyone (this was a cross disciplinary place, so the technical employees didn't just consist of developers but also mech e's, chemists, jack-of-all-trades, etc) was invited to shadow someone with sales for a few hours. Just seeing the sheer amount of data that they have to keep track of and stay on top of was really eye opening.
djaychela 10y ago
This, indeed. I'm currently teaching in schools in the UK, and nearly all the IT departments I deal with are solely interested in IT for its own end. I've heard IT managers (at different schools) refer to it as "[my] network" or "[my] machines" - totally missing the point that they're all there for one reason, to facilitate learning. While this certainly isn't the case in all schools, the majority of the ones I've worked at have IT departments who really have no interest in or knowledge of what teachers really need/want to do, and simply put their own pre-decided processes and systems in place. When trying to get something changed, a brick wall of technobabble is presented to school management who generally don't know any better and defer to this 'higher power'. Unfortunately I know enough to have seen through many such reasons (such as "You can't have more than 10 Apple devices on a Wi-Fi network, it will crawl to a halt", and "Firefox? I'm not having that rubbish on my network - we're sticking with Internet Explorer"), but there's no way to convince anyone in management that they're being sold a dummy, particularly when it was they who decided to hire the IT manager in the first place. I've got a room of machines where it takes 5 minutes to run the software I use to teach (Cubase) because the machines have mandatory profiles enforced that have been taken before the plug-in scanning has been done, so it does this scan (5 minutes or so) every time you run it. Think of the learning time lost over the 5 years that's been in place. I really think a plan of getting these people out of their offices and into the workplace to shadow people who use what they maintain would make a world of difference. Instead of being some whiner who creates 'frivolous' support requests, they would see that a bad decision can drastically impact the experience of everyone who uses their tools. I think I say this as someone who has been on the other side of the fence; I do support for some IT installations (including a first school with 400 pupils), so I'm tech savvy enough to be able to do what's needed, but try to approach it from a function-first rather than ideological approach.
Iv 10y ago
OK, maybe this is a case of engineering bragging, but I get the feeling that this will happen more naturally without a class this way. As an electronic and software engineer, I have been repeatedly told that while my electronic and software skills are important, what really made a good engineer was their capacity to solve problems, therefore their capacity to understand them, which often means to learn about the whole domain of the problem. Maybe that is just anecdotal evidence but I have found that engineers are often far more open and confident about learning new things in a totally different domains than other specialties.

by barrkel 10y ago

BurningFrog 10y ago

What's most important is that engineers have contact directly with users or their representatives and get a grasp of how and why their code is used in real life. The more this gets filtered through layers of communication and management, the worse the software will be to use. Making the programmers understand the subject area on their own also has a benefit, but it seems a far more costly way.

tyingq 10y ago
If the business side, specifically product management / direction is reasonably skilled, you're missing out on a lot not talking with them regularly. Talking directly with the users is fine. But if that is your sole input, something is probably broken.
- BurningFrog 10y ago
  Yeah, that's what I mean by "or their representatives".
  - tyingq 10y ago
    Ah, okay. Took that to mean customer support or similar. Customers sometimes describe what they want, not what they need, what they would pay for, what might change things entirely, etc. There is some amount of product direction that is made without existing customer input.
    - BurningFrog 10y ago
      Yeah, representatives" is not the best word.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
ozim 10y ago
I don't like to fix first line problems but I really like to watch how users are actually using what I have built. Some eye opening moments come from that.
thirdsun 10y ago
I couldn't agree more. As someone who develops internal applications in a non-tech company I consider it essential to have a different, non-developer perspective on the subject as well as direct, frequent communication with the the actual users of the product, which includes me. Potential problems and room for improvements are easily discoverable that way.

parennoob 10y ago

This. While I have come around to the concept of "It's probably better if more people learn to code", I rarely see other parts of the company so eager to share their knowledge. In particular, I'd like more training on law and finance. For some reason, I have never seen any lawyers or accountants being eager to teach me about interpreting laws, or balancing books.

azernik 10y ago
I'm not so sure every engineer needs to know that. I think the important thing is for everyone to have some understanding of the core business. If you're Stripe, that's coding, APIs, and finance/payments (that last is the bit engineers should be taught). If you're Google, that's ads and ad-buying - hence the company practice of giving engineers (and maybe other employees?) some free ad credits so they can see what the customer perspective looks like.

joatmon-snoo 10y ago

The company I was at this past summer took a few days where everyone (this was a cross disciplinary place, so the technical employees didn't just consist of developers but also mech e's, chemists, jack-of-all-trades, etc) was invited to shadow someone with sales for a few hours. Just seeing the sheer amount of data that they have to keep track of and stay on top of was really eye opening.

djaychela 10y ago

This, indeed. I'm currently teaching in schools in the UK, and nearly all the IT departments I deal with are solely interested in IT for its own end. I've heard IT managers (at different schools) refer to it as "[my] network" or "[my] machines" - totally missing the point that they're all there for one reason, to facilitate learning. While this certainly isn't the case in all schools, the majority of the ones I've worked at have IT departments who really have no interest in or knowledge of what teachers really need/want to do, and simply put their own pre-decided processes and systems in place. When trying to get something changed, a brick wall of technobabble is presented to school management who generally don't know any better and defer to this 'higher power'. Unfortunately I know enough to have seen through many such reasons (such as "You can't have more than 10 Apple devices on a Wi-Fi network, it will crawl to a halt", and "Firefox? I'm not having that rubbish on my network - we're sticking with Internet Explorer"), but there's no way to convince anyone in management that they're being sold a dummy, particularly when it was they who decided to hire the IT manager in the first place. I've got a room of machines where it takes 5 minutes to run the software I use to teach (Cubase) because the machines have mandatory profiles enforced that have been taken before the plug-in scanning has been done, so it does this scan (5 minutes or so) every time you run it. Think of the learning time lost over the 5 years that's been in place. I really think a plan of getting these people out of their offices and into the workplace to shadow people who use what they maintain would make a world of difference. Instead of being some whiner who creates 'frivolous' support requests, they would see that a bad decision can drastically impact the experience of everyone who uses their tools. I think I say this as someone who has been on the other side of the fence; I do support for some IT installations (including a first school with 400 pupils), so I'm tech savvy enough to be able to do what's needed, but try to approach it from a function-first rather than ideological approach.

Iv 10y ago

OK, maybe this is a case of engineering bragging, but I get the feeling that this will happen more naturally without a class this way. As an electronic and software engineer, I have been repeatedly told that while my electronic and software skills are important, what really made a good engineer was their capacity to solve problems, therefore their capacity to understand them, which often means to learn about the whole domain of the problem. Maybe that is just anecdotal evidence but I have found that engineers are often far more open and confident about learning new things in a totally different domains than other specialties.