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Software needs to be used by users. It’s unlikely your developers are so innately talented that everything a user wants to do is obvious and intuitive. So docs

by efitz 4y ago

Software needs to be used by users. It’s unlikely your developers are so innately talented that everything a user wants to do is obvious and intuitive. So docs, etc matter. Other teams like marketing need to make schedules because they spend huge amounts of money doing things to make your product successful, that have nothing to do with code. For example, launch events, advertising, conferences, executive briefings for key customers, etc. Planning, dates, progress reports, etc are all needed because unless you are a lone open source developer, you have to work with others. Users will use your software in unexpected ways. Hackers will try to break it. And users will expect it to work flawlessly when they need to use it to generate their report for their VP meeting in 5 minutes. Testing is critical to ensuring that your software doesn’t suck for your users and make them hate you. The business you work for probably doesn’t exist with the mission to leave you alone and let you code. They want to solve a customer problem by creating, marketing, selling and/or supporting a software product. Your management wants to know that all the money they are spending on your salaries is getting them a positive ROI. Letting them know what you’re doing and providing them with content about capabilities and features that can be used in marketing, makes them want to keep paying you. Missing deadlines, failing to deliver non-code deliverables, failing to provide status, and being jerks in general make management want to cut your project (and maybe your job) and do something else with cooperative people. Yes, there are pathological extremes to all of these things and to the points you raised in your post, but I see too many developers who think that developing software is just about coding and that everything else is extraneous. In reality, the vast majority of your time is probably best spent NOT coding. [ed] spelling, paragraph break

secfirstmd 4y ago
Well said. I work on engineering stuff but I spend a huge amount of time encouraging people to understand the other parts of the business and their needs.
photochemsyn 4y ago
> "They want to solve a customer problem by creating, marketing, selling and/or supporting a software product. Your management wants to know that all the money they are spending on your salaries is getting them a positive ROI." This is all true for the somewhat narrow field of commercial software development for the consumer end-user where profit margins determine success or failure in terms of paying off the capital investors, but many organized engineering efforts have other goals, e.g. replacing some organization's decrepit internal data storage, archiving and retrieval system where robustness matters more than anything else, or designing a research program aimed at solving a complex technological problem, writing software that controls an electrical grid, and so on. Applying the maximize-short-term-profit mentality to such problems generally doesn't end well.

by efitz 4y ago

secfirstmd 4y ago

Well said. I work on engineering stuff but I spend a huge amount of time encouraging people to understand the other parts of the business and their needs.

photochemsyn 4y ago

> "They want to solve a customer problem by creating, marketing, selling and/or supporting a software product. Your management wants to know that all the money they are spending on your salaries is getting them a positive ROI." This is all true for the somewhat narrow field of commercial software development for the consumer end-user where profit margins determine success or failure in terms of paying off the capital investors, but many organized engineering efforts have other goals, e.g. replacing some organization's decrepit internal data storage, archiving and retrieval system where robustness matters more than anything else, or designing a research program aimed at solving a complex technological problem, writing software that controls an electrical grid, and so on. Applying the maximize-short-term-profit mentality to such problems generally doesn't end well.