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> Engineers are encouraged to interact with the rest of the business and build relationships with non-engineers. In contrast, traditional companies often make i

> Engineers are encouraged to interact with the rest of the business and build relationships with non-engineers. In contrast, traditional companies often make it impossible for developers to interact with the rest of the business. In my experience “traditional companies” will often have a bunch of people in cushy “gatekeeping“ jobs whose main function is basically forwarding emails back and forth between devs and the business. If you try to get direct access to the business usually the business is quite happy but the gatekeepers get very upset.

deleted 5y ago
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dasKrokodil 5y ago
The gatekeepers are the ones with the people skills: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo
- ericbarrett 5y ago
  What a utopia this movie portrays! Individual cubicles, administrative assistants for senior staff, and the protagonist has only been asked to work over a single weekend.
  - lostdog 5y ago
    Funny to look back. Here's Intel's HQ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrZrTJqK7ys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrZrTJqK7ys All I can think is "Wow, I bet I could really focus on something difficult in that cubicle!"
  - 1ark 5y ago
    ... and, unpopular opinion, business attire!
whynotmaybe 5y ago
I've also seen some instance where gatekeeper were pretty effective at filtering users demands because some of those requests were too dumb and the "paying" users were used to have everything they wanted, and because they "paid" the dev department, "they had to do everything they wanted". Like asking for a 6months dev work to help them save 1 hour annually on an annoying task they had to do.
- hatchnyc 5y ago
  My experience has been the exact opposite, if the developers understand what the business is trying to accomplish and what the incentives are then they are in a much better position to prioritize and build the right thing. Every single time I’ve seen 6 months of work on a useless or low value feature it has been the result of the dev team getting requests via some PM telephone game.
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    This is a tricky balance. Developers can also get overwhelmed with requests for estimates, automation tasks, etc etc, and get annoyed that people have so much contact with them. But it is a tricky balance; there's no obvious solution.
    - kragen 5y ago
      Sometimes it's helpful to have some division of labor between field/sales/support engineers who go to handhold customers, understand their particular problems, and prototype fixes, and "product engineers" who have less customer interaction. This is somewhat similar to the SRE/SWE split at places like Google. If I were designing an organization with such a division of labor, those wouldn't be different job descriptions but different activities within a single job description; maybe I'd spend 22 days a month doing product-engineer stuff like adding features, and 3 days a month doing support-engineer stuff like visiting customer sites, diagnosing customer problems, and answering calls, while maybe hatchnyc would prefer to spend 22 days a month doing support-engineer stuff and 3 days a month doing product-engineer stuff. The reason is that, doing either activity, you gain an enormous amount of knowledge that's crucial to the other activity, but very difficult to even put into words, much less into a knowledge base. Bill Gates found it useful to answer tech support calls as late as 01989: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/289857 https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/289857
lloydatkinson 5y ago
I wish I could upvote this twice. So true, it's very frustrating.
jermeh 5y ago
I work in a "traditional company" and the gatekeepers were installed to keep developers from going insane. When we have too much information back and forth between business and engineering, the loudest complaints from the business side (where the $$$ comes from today and tomorrow) drowns out the team's and department's internal goals, which are usually much longer term (meaning the $$$ is in months or years, not next week). I believe this is why the author noticed that certain types of companies had engineers say the product owner was one of the reasons they're more satisfied. From when I started at my role, my team went about 2 years without one, and then within months of having one, we have been much more productive and have managed to create much more immediate and future value for the company.
- Jensson 5y ago
  The trick big tech uses to solve this is to not just pay extra for above average engineering talent, they pay extra for above average talent in all areas. So the people you talk to are almost always pretty reasonable and understanding, they want things done and complains but they don't ask for the impossible or unreasonable.
  - hiptobecubic 5y ago
    There are also product managers and UX engineers. It's not like every random coder is interacting with sales on the go to market strategy.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      Product managers and UX engineers are there to do product management or UX design, not to filter information from the rest of the company to programmers. That means that most of sales requests are better forwarded to a product manager or UX designer, but there is nothing stopping them from directly filing a bug report to a developer and chatting about potential fixes/timelines etc. Also if some feature is important the product manager can just tell them to talk directly with the relevant engineer to get the feature done.
  - 5y ago
rubyist5eva 5y ago
My current company is like this. I work directly with the business people anyway. When anyone says anything I just point them to my output, quality, and the feedback from the business people - shuts them up every time.
- jdgoesmarching 5y ago
  I’m one of these hypothetical gatekeepers and would be thrilled if a dev could successfully take this off my plate. Just prioritizing the incoming requests from stakeholders is a full-time job.
bengale 5y ago
At the last large traditional place I was at it seemed a lot like the upper management types had put these gatekeepers in place so they had people that would pander to them. The amount of times one of them told me they couldn't tell their boss some bad news for risk of getting fired or chewed out, but wouldn't let me go and tell them the truth was mad. From what I could tell no-one was firing engineers because it was too expensive and we didn't really care since we could get more work within a few hours, and the "bosses" didn't like the lack of power they had in that dynamic.
- shagie 5y ago
  A clear implementation of the Thermocline of Truth - https://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-themocline-of-truth/ https://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-...
  - bengale 5y ago
    Yeah that all sounds very familiar.
    - shagie 5y ago
      As an aside, his other posts of the Dead Sea effect - http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-dead-sea-effect/ http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d... And Anatomy of a runaway IT project https://brucefwebster.com/2008/06/16/anatomy-of-a-runaway-it-project/ https://brucefwebster.com/2008/06/16/anatomy-of-a-runaway-it... Those are fun reads too.
deleted 5y ago
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tombert 5y ago
Yeah, I learned the hard way that one of the worst things you can say at a megacorporation is "this manager is just creating work to justify their existence in the company". In my case, it was directly applied to a specific manager (who heard me say it), and it led to me being lectured and yelled at and told that it was "unprofessional" talk (which to be fair it kind of was).
- datavirtue 5y ago
  Yelling at people at work is unprofessional. Sometimes it's illegal if you are a federally protected class.
  - tombert 5y ago
    I'm definitely not a protected class (I'm a tall white dude), and I am not being 100% fair; they weren't screaming at me or anything, just an elevated voice and very angry words. I don't believe they said any curse words, and even if they did I was somewhat sympathetic to why they would be upset with me (even though I do stand by the content of what I said). It was probably still unprofessional, but probably not as bad as I made it sound...my bad!
a4isms 5y ago
> In my experience “traditional companies” will often have a bunch of people in cushy “gatekeeping“ jobs whose main function is basically forwarding emails back and forth between devs and the business. If you try to get direct access to the business usually the business is quite happy but the gatekeepers get very upset. “But I’ve got people skills, dammit!”—Tom Smykowski
snidane 5y ago
The best arrangement is to have business report to business and engineers report to IT, but have them communicate directly. This was they can't be pressured by business into short term tasks, because they are on the same level and not just mere subordinates of business folks. In traditional (not engineer-first) companies, engineers are subordinates of PMs or business directly without their own agenda, so they just accept the fate and become a feature factory for the company.
chronologist 5y ago
Constructive / progressive organizations can be built or transformed into, where collaborative knowledge-work happens at all levels. Scrum is a parody and pretty much anti-agile. Traditional organizations are driven by the cost-accounting mindset that creates gate-keepers and makes it impossible to share a common purpose, let alone collaborate across teams, units or vertically.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dasKrokodil 5y ago

The gatekeepers are the ones with the people skills: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo

ericbarrett 5y ago
What a utopia this movie portrays! Individual cubicles, administrative assistants for senior staff, and the protagonist has only been asked to work over a single weekend.
- lostdog 5y ago
  Funny to look back. Here's Intel's HQ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrZrTJqK7ys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrZrTJqK7ys All I can think is "Wow, I bet I could really focus on something difficult in that cubicle!"
- 1ark 5y ago
  ... and, unpopular opinion, business attire!

whynotmaybe 5y ago

I've also seen some instance where gatekeeper were pretty effective at filtering users demands because some of those requests were too dumb and the "paying" users were used to have everything they wanted, and because they "paid" the dev department, "they had to do everything they wanted". Like asking for a 6months dev work to help them save 1 hour annually on an annoying task they had to do.

hatchnyc 5y ago
My experience has been the exact opposite, if the developers understand what the business is trying to accomplish and what the incentives are then they are in a much better position to prioritize and build the right thing. Every single time I’ve seen 6 months of work on a useless or low value feature it has been the result of the dev team getting requests via some PM telephone game.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  This is a tricky balance. Developers can also get overwhelmed with requests for estimates, automation tasks, etc etc, and get annoyed that people have so much contact with them. But it is a tricky balance; there's no obvious solution.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Sometimes it's helpful to have some division of labor between field/sales/support engineers who go to handhold customers, understand their particular problems, and prototype fixes, and "product engineers" who have less customer interaction. This is somewhat similar to the SRE/SWE split at places like Google. If I were designing an organization with such a division of labor, those wouldn't be different job descriptions but different activities within a single job description; maybe I'd spend 22 days a month doing product-engineer stuff like adding features, and 3 days a month doing support-engineer stuff like visiting customer sites, diagnosing customer problems, and answering calls, while maybe hatchnyc would prefer to spend 22 days a month doing support-engineer stuff and 3 days a month doing product-engineer stuff. The reason is that, doing either activity, you gain an enormous amount of knowledge that's crucial to the other activity, but very difficult to even put into words, much less into a knowledge base. Bill Gates found it useful to answer tech support calls as late as 01989: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/289857 https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/289857

lloydatkinson 5y ago

I wish I could upvote this twice. So true, it's very frustrating.

jermeh 5y ago

I work in a "traditional company" and the gatekeepers were installed to keep developers from going insane. When we have too much information back and forth between business and engineering, the loudest complaints from the business side (where the $$$ comes from today and tomorrow) drowns out the team's and department's internal goals, which are usually much longer term (meaning the $$$ is in months or years, not next week). I believe this is why the author noticed that certain types of companies had engineers say the product owner was one of the reasons they're more satisfied. From when I started at my role, my team went about 2 years without one, and then within months of having one, we have been much more productive and have managed to create much more immediate and future value for the company.

Jensson 5y ago
The trick big tech uses to solve this is to not just pay extra for above average engineering talent, they pay extra for above average talent in all areas. So the people you talk to are almost always pretty reasonable and understanding, they want things done and complains but they don't ask for the impossible or unreasonable.
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  There are also product managers and UX engineers. It's not like every random coder is interacting with sales on the go to market strategy.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    Product managers and UX engineers are there to do product management or UX design, not to filter information from the rest of the company to programmers. That means that most of sales requests are better forwarded to a product manager or UX designer, but there is nothing stopping them from directly filing a bug report to a developer and chatting about potential fixes/timelines etc. Also if some feature is important the product manager can just tell them to talk directly with the relevant engineer to get the feature done.
- 5y ago

rubyist5eva 5y ago

My current company is like this. I work directly with the business people anyway. When anyone says anything I just point them to my output, quality, and the feedback from the business people - shuts them up every time.

jdgoesmarching 5y ago
I’m one of these hypothetical gatekeepers and would be thrilled if a dev could successfully take this off my plate. Just prioritizing the incoming requests from stakeholders is a full-time job.

bengale 5y ago

At the last large traditional place I was at it seemed a lot like the upper management types had put these gatekeepers in place so they had people that would pander to them. The amount of times one of them told me they couldn't tell their boss some bad news for risk of getting fired or chewed out, but wouldn't let me go and tell them the truth was mad. From what I could tell no-one was firing engineers because it was too expensive and we didn't really care since we could get more work within a few hours, and the "bosses" didn't like the lack of power they had in that dynamic.

shagie 5y ago
A clear implementation of the Thermocline of Truth - https://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-themocline-of-truth/ https://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-...
- bengale 5y ago
  Yeah that all sounds very familiar.
  - shagie 5y ago
    As an aside, his other posts of the Dead Sea effect - http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-dead-sea-effect/ http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d... And Anatomy of a runaway IT project https://brucefwebster.com/2008/06/16/anatomy-of-a-runaway-it-project/ https://brucefwebster.com/2008/06/16/anatomy-of-a-runaway-it... Those are fun reads too.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tombert 5y ago

Yeah, I learned the hard way that one of the worst things you can say at a megacorporation is "this manager is just creating work to justify their existence in the company". In my case, it was directly applied to a specific manager (who heard me say it), and it led to me being lectured and yelled at and told that it was "unprofessional" talk (which to be fair it kind of was).

datavirtue 5y ago
Yelling at people at work is unprofessional. Sometimes it's illegal if you are a federally protected class.
- tombert 5y ago
  I'm definitely not a protected class (I'm a tall white dude), and I am not being 100% fair; they weren't screaming at me or anything, just an elevated voice and very angry words. I don't believe they said any curse words, and even if they did I was somewhat sympathetic to why they would be upset with me (even though I do stand by the content of what I said). It was probably still unprofessional, but probably not as bad as I made it sound...my bad!

a4isms 5y ago

> In my experience “traditional companies” will often have a bunch of people in cushy “gatekeeping“ jobs whose main function is basically forwarding emails back and forth between devs and the business. If you try to get direct access to the business usually the business is quite happy but the gatekeepers get very upset. “But I’ve got people skills, dammit!”—Tom Smykowski

snidane 5y ago

The best arrangement is to have business report to business and engineers report to IT, but have them communicate directly. This was they can't be pressured by business into short term tasks, because they are on the same level and not just mere subordinates of business folks. In traditional (not engineer-first) companies, engineers are subordinates of PMs or business directly without their own agenda, so they just accept the fate and become a feature factory for the company.

chronologist 5y ago

Constructive / progressive organizations can be built or transformed into, where collaborative knowledge-work happens at all levels. Scrum is a parody and pretty much anti-agile. Traditional organizations are driven by the cost-accounting mindset that creates gate-keepers and makes it impossible to share a common purpose, let alone collaborate across teams, units or vertically.