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At Thread we encouraged non-engineers to contribute to the codebase and it was a broadly great experience: https://danpalmer.me/2018-01-04-teaching-non-engineer

At Thread we encouraged non-engineers to contribute to the codebase and it was a broadly great experience: https://danpalmer.me/2018-01-04-teaching-non-engineers-how-to-contribute-code/ https://danpalmer.me/2018-01-04-teaching-non-engineers-how-t... One downside, many tools end up interacting with "active engineers", and while hundreds of dollars per month of SaaS costs per engineer is reasonable, paying that much for a non-engineer to fix a typo or tweak a config value once a month isn't great.

Brian_K_White 3y ago
To me that is exactly a failure of usefulness that makes those tools less valuable and counts towards avoiding them. It's probably very difficult to quantify what is lost vs what is gained by buying in to things like that, but "difficult to quantify" doesn't mean there's nothing there. It's not even the fixed typo that's the valuable lost thing, it's the frictionless discovery or creation of a whole new useful developer or ops admin. Also the value of allowing people to take pride in and care about their work, which is your product. What's that worth? Hard to measure but I will confidently say it's a lot.