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Engineers with decent social skills tend to get promoted into roles where they're managing stakeholder relationships.

• lolinder 2y ago
  And said engineers often end up wishing they hadn't. Interacting directly with stakeholders isn't all it's cracked up to be. Maybe I've just had good luck with product managers, but I tend to enjoy my work the most when someone else is filtering the stakeholders' long and constantly changing wishlist for me and turning it into something coherent and actionable.
• vishnugupta 2y ago
  That's how it was in the initial days/years. However those days are long gone. Now there are these Product Managers who have absolutely no clue how software is built. Interestingly I'm seeing similar trend in many other fields; my car goes to servicing and there's some dude who just knows jargons interfacing with me, for the minutest of my questions he will "get back to me after consulting the line workers", same with my house construction. I had to get through 4 layers of people to finally get to the person who is actually doing the electrical wiring to clearly explain what is it that I wanted.
  • candiddevmike 2y ago
    Hopefully LLMs will replace all of the "I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to" folks
  • SoftTalker 2y ago
    > my car goes to servicing and there's some dude who just knows jargons interfacing with me, for the minutest of my questions he will "get back to me after consulting the line workers" That's because he's not there to explain what they are doing. He likely doesn't know a spark plug from a fuel injector. He's there to sell you more services.