3 ms·

You may have had the pleasure of working at places where developers are very self-directing and don't need constant hand holding. As an engineer (developer) of

by 93po 4y ago

You may have had the pleasure of working at places where developers are very self-directing and don't need constant hand holding. As an engineer (developer) of more than a decade that has since transitioned to product, my experience is that developers (again, just in my experiences) at places I've worked are entirely are completely incapable of knowing what to build. They don't ask the right questions and they don't understand the business needs well enough to know the right solutions. They get stuck at the smallest hurdles and I have to guide them over each and every one of them, even when it's 98% a technical problem (which legacy database should this application be populating? I don't know, let's ask the PM instead of consulting technical documentation or running our own profiling to determine this). They don't want to make decisions around anything at all. Managing questions and making decisions for a team of 6 is easily a full time job for me combined with client management and meetings. I work a lot of extra hours to do actual PM work on top of that. I realize this is also largely my organization's fault for not having a dedicated project manager, but that's still not really helping me see your argument about needing fewer non-coders.

williamcotton 4y ago
What if instead of you and a team of six developers there were just yourself and one other who did all of the development as well as product work? And what if the tools you were using for development and even the language itself were geared specifically for your domain? What if you have computer engineers who worked on the language and tools so you could focus as much on the customers and the product? People use Google Sheets without having to know anything about how Google Sheets is written or deployed! My theory is that a lot of management is there in an attempt to make up for all of the organizational inefficiencies and that meetings are mainly there to make up for inefficiencies in communication because of the divide between the "what" and "how" at the same level of abstraction. I'm perfectly fine with top-level management keeping all of their programming confined to a spreadsheet but even there I see room for improvements to their tooling!

by 93po 4y ago

williamcotton 4y ago

What if instead of you and a team of six developers there were just yourself and one other who did all of the development as well as product work? And what if the tools you were using for development and even the language itself were geared specifically for your domain? What if you have computer engineers who worked on the language and tools so you could focus as much on the customers and the product? People use Google Sheets without having to know anything about how Google Sheets is written or deployed! My theory is that a lot of management is there in an attempt to make up for all of the organizational inefficiencies and that meetings are mainly there to make up for inefficiencies in communication because of the divide between the "what" and "how" at the same level of abstraction. I'm perfectly fine with top-level management keeping all of their programming confined to a spreadsheet but even there I see room for improvements to their tooling!