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> or if I'm working in a dystopia Going to guess you're both young and working at a tech company as opposed to a big company that also does some tech things.
by mdorazio 3y ago
> or if I'm working in a dystopia
Going to guess you're both young and working at a tech company as opposed to a big company that also does some tech things.
Prior to the rise of Agile and the decrease in waterfall-style development the role of Business Analyst was very popular. It still is at many companies that do need to do waterfall development, but less so these days. The Business Analyst (BA) role is semi-technical and requires some subject matter expertise, but generally doesn't do much actual writing of code. Instead it's focused on requirements gathering, wireframe creation, test case creation & running, bug logging, and status reporting. I know you're probably saying "that's at least half of my job!" and you're right, but now go and look at the difference in pay between a BA and a developer. It turns out that if you remove the "actually writes code" part of the job, it's not worth nearly as much and I think that's what the comment above is trying to express.
- danpalmer 3y agoIn my experience, most of these aspects – requirements gathering, wireframing, test case specification, even bug logging – have a business side and a technical side. I think Product Managers often take on a lot of these BA responsibilities, they've got the domain knowledge, but there's another step of translation from "build an X that does Y" to "build an X, in A, that does Y, but not Z, in B time, integrating with systems I, J, K". I think that takes an engineering perspective. I've not worked with anyone titled Business Analyst that does the role you've described, but working with PMs, BI people, and others, there's a large gulf between requirements and tests that they would specify at their level, and requirements and tests that a programmer could work from.