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> ‘Engineers get sidetracked by things that make engineers excited, not that solve real problems for users’ The real question is why business allows them to. I

> ‘Engineers get sidetracked by things that make engineers excited, not that solve real problems for users’ The real question is why business allows them to. I find it entertaining to try to substitute another profession for engineer in the sentence above and see if it still works. Lawyers, teachers, doctors, civil architects...

pacifika 8y ago
Well perhaps it’s the business doing pie in the sky thinking resulting in these solutions. It’s not without a reason the Indy dev is highlighted here.
- DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
  in most companies (I know) the business stakeholders have little idea about what makes sense within and for engineering. So they rely on their 'subject matter expert' engineers to find the best decisions. (and a place that doesn't trust their engineers to come up with the right solution is doomed imo). This problem usually indicates a weak team, or lack of leadership within engineering. But granted, selecting a weak CTO (who picks snowflake & diva engineers) should be attributed to the business.
arethuza 8y ago
My experiences with lawyers suggests that they can have a tendency to get sidetracked that is most definitely "not that solve real problems for users" - the real difference with lawyers being that they will then charge you vast amounts of money for their sidetracks.
cturner 8y ago
The precious commodity with our work is cognitive load. We can build tooling that reduces future cognitive load. As a result, we have access to multipliers. There is no analogy to this with the other fields.
- philwelch 8y ago
  The idea that tooling "reduces" cognitive load is based on the assumption that tooling lets you work in terms of abstractions rather than worrying about what the tooling actually does. This assumption breaks down as soon as the tooling itself breaks down. At that point, not only do you have to worry about the underlying problems that the tooling is intended to solve, but you also have to worry about the implementation details of the tooling itself. Tooling breaks down more often when it's more complicated, and you need more complexity when your tooling abstracts over a large amount of complexity, so the more that your tooling is supposed to reduce your cognitive load, the more likely it will break in such a way that it actually increases your cognitive load.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
dasKrokodil 8y ago
Pilots!
TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
'CEOs get excited by things that make CEOs excited, not that solve real problems for real users...' Still works, mostly. Certainly true of architects, partially true of lawyers and doctors, less true of teachers. The key difference is the amount of f2f time with users/customers/clients. If you add a dumb feature to your site and you have to talk to users about it f2f - not over Twitter or Slack or Medium, but in person - you're going to give yourself a much more realistic idea of what matters to them.
- mr_toad 8y ago
  > CEOs get excited by things that make CEOs excited They seem particularly enarmoured with re-arranging the org-charts.
Jordanpomeroy 8y ago
> `you’re on Medium after all’ Ahhhhh! You got me!

pacifika 8y ago

Well perhaps it’s the business doing pie in the sky thinking resulting in these solutions. It’s not without a reason the Indy dev is highlighted here.

DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
in most companies (I know) the business stakeholders have little idea about what makes sense within and for engineering. So they rely on their 'subject matter expert' engineers to find the best decisions. (and a place that doesn't trust their engineers to come up with the right solution is doomed imo). This problem usually indicates a weak team, or lack of leadership within engineering. But granted, selecting a weak CTO (who picks snowflake & diva engineers) should be attributed to the business.

arethuza 8y ago

My experiences with lawyers suggests that they can have a tendency to get sidetracked that is most definitely "not that solve real problems for users" - the real difference with lawyers being that they will then charge you vast amounts of money for their sidetracks.

cturner 8y ago

The precious commodity with our work is cognitive load. We can build tooling that reduces future cognitive load. As a result, we have access to multipliers. There is no analogy to this with the other fields.

philwelch 8y ago
The idea that tooling "reduces" cognitive load is based on the assumption that tooling lets you work in terms of abstractions rather than worrying about what the tooling actually does. This assumption breaks down as soon as the tooling itself breaks down. At that point, not only do you have to worry about the underlying problems that the tooling is intended to solve, but you also have to worry about the implementation details of the tooling itself. Tooling breaks down more often when it's more complicated, and you need more complexity when your tooling abstracts over a large amount of complexity, so the more that your tooling is supposed to reduce your cognitive load, the more likely it will break in such a way that it actually increases your cognitive load.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

dasKrokodil 8y ago

Pilots!

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago

'CEOs get excited by things that make CEOs excited, not that solve real problems for real users...' Still works, mostly. Certainly true of architects, partially true of lawyers and doctors, less true of teachers. The key difference is the amount of f2f time with users/customers/clients. If you add a dumb feature to your site and you have to talk to users about it f2f - not over Twitter or Slack or Medium, but in person - you're going to give yourself a much more realistic idea of what matters to them.

mr_toad 8y ago
> CEOs get excited by things that make CEOs excited They seem particularly enarmoured with re-arranging the org-charts.

Jordanpomeroy 8y ago

> `you’re on Medium after all’ Ahhhhh! You got me!