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In my experience, engineers are mostly told “make this” and denied the opportunity to exercise broader strategy decision making skills. It’s “don’t worry your
by david38 5y ago
In my experience, engineers are mostly told “make this” and denied the opportunity to exercise broader strategy decision making skills.
It’s “don’t worry your pretty little head”, “we need you spending time on this, not wasting it on that”, “you don’t have all the information”, “the best way to help is to be heads-down programming and let us do our job of strategy”.
All ways to keep you in your place. Fast forward ten years, and is it really surprising that a perfectly capable engineer wouldn’t succeed on the first shot?
Funny thing, give him six months of practice (often the current strategy people had far more) and surprise, he’s perfectly competent!
- rramadass 5y agoRight you are! Bjarne Stroustrup - An Organisation that treats its Programmers as morons will soon have Programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only. Note also that most successful Tech. Companies were Started/Managed/Grown by "Engineers" rather than MBA types (who just come in later to claim the glory :-)
- stainforth 5y agoThere are also implications as to whose names should be on the ownership paperwork if everyone is all participating at a high level, which should be a constant reminder as to where the power is and is kept.
- ngc248 5y agoIt is tthe agile mindset also which is contributing to the problem. Agile should only be used while executing, when you know all the requirements and just need to execute. Agile should not be used for R&D or when you are trying to come up woth a new thing. Of course time bound it, but it cannot be broken down intto user stories or whatnot. Agile is taking all the fun out of software development. Turning engineers into software factory workers.
- quickthrower2 5y agoMy biggest bugbear is higher ups don’t take gut feeling from people who have done engineering for decades seriously and so undermine their strategy with assumptions that could be corrected if they listened downward. It’s a trope: the company that turned from the brink when management listened to staff, perhaps cutting out middle management as a comms layer, but its never been my experience that anyone wants to do that. They’ll hear you but listen and take seriously? How many companies deny tech debt paydown but then have people working on badly researched feature ideas that add no value to the business.