It's not a question of whether it's easier for programmers to do BD stuff, or BMAs to learn technical details; it's a question of whether you want to waste your

It's not a question of whether it's easier for programmers to do BD stuff, or BMAs to learn technical details; it's a question of whether you want to waste your highly trained and expensive programmer's time dealing with customers. Sure you need somebody technical in front of customers, but the whole point of org structures is to delegate roles to increase efficiency. This methodology strikes me as ridiculous - who is going to volunteer for QA work? What if your 'QA guy' gets bored and decides to become lead programmer for an area, but can't really handle it? What if a bunch of programmers get together and find a really interesting technical problem, and get lost in the jungle for 6 months whilst contributing nothing to the project? I've never heard of PMs or managers as 'empowering' their teams to do work - in the engineering world they're simply considered to act as shields against the crap that flies around at the next level up (contractual and legal shenannigans - do you really want programmers getting into that?), and helpers to get rid of admin problems.