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Agreed. I've found that part of the problem is how we (engineers) communicate value to non-engineers. It's not right to get upset with a laymen/business people
by hliyan 6y ago
Agreed. I've found that part of the problem is how we (engineers) communicate value to non-engineers. It's not right to get upset with a laymen/business people without putting some effort into explaining. I've always found this type of communication effective:
- This database change will improve our page load time from 3s to 1s at the cost of 25% of a sprint's capacity.
- This library version change takes X amount of time because there are 45 sites in the code we need to change, and that impacts 120 test cases which we need to rerun.
- Not adopting this <security tech> puts us at risk of an incident like <example incident from the news>.
- karatestomp 6y agoI've noticed that (low- to mid-level, at least) business, marketing, and other folks are generally a whole lot looser with their numbers than developers are. That is, they'll toss around measures that aren't meaningful—and not just in some quibbling sense of "well technically maybe these could possibly be wrong" but truly are very likely to be way off the mark—because they didn't properly control for confounders or are clearly measuring the wrong thing or whatever. They'll assign meaning to measures that could easily have nothing to do with what they're saying they mean, or mean the opposite. ... but this usually goes over just fine. Rarely questioned. I think if they didn't do this they'd be just as bad off as developers, if not worse due to (again, generalizing) having a worse understanding of how to measure things well.