While this sounds nice in a vacuum, I don't think that the reality for many people over here. Its usually: "our product needs X, get it done". You can listen t

While this sounds nice in a vacuum, I don't think that the reality for many people over here. Its usually: "our product needs X, get it done". You can listen to that manager for hours or days, use your psychiatrist hat to extract more useful info, renegotiate requrements etc, but that doesn't save you from probably weeks or months of just hard work. I would understand if one is a contact person for some account. And then you listen to your client as best you can, write up a doc/ticket/whatever for someone else to deal with that. A janitor who listens most of the time isn't really a good janitor so this is much less universal than it sounds.