8 ms·

My experience has been the exact opposite, if the developers understand what the business is trying to accomplish and what the incentives are then they are in a

My experience has been the exact opposite, if the developers understand what the business is trying to accomplish and what the incentives are then they are in a much better position to prioritize and build the right thing. Every single time I’ve seen 6 months of work on a useless or low value feature it has been the result of the dev team getting requests via some PM telephone game.

robertlagrant 5y ago
This is a tricky balance. Developers can also get overwhelmed with requests for estimates, automation tasks, etc etc, and get annoyed that people have so much contact with them. But it is a tricky balance; there's no obvious solution.
- kragen 5y ago
  Sometimes it's helpful to have some division of labor between field/sales/support engineers who go to handhold customers, understand their particular problems, and prototype fixes, and "product engineers" who have less customer interaction. This is somewhat similar to the SRE/SWE split at places like Google. If I were designing an organization with such a division of labor, those wouldn't be different job descriptions but different activities within a single job description; maybe I'd spend 22 days a month doing product-engineer stuff like adding features, and 3 days a month doing support-engineer stuff like visiting customer sites, diagnosing customer problems, and answering calls, while maybe hatchnyc would prefer to spend 22 days a month doing support-engineer stuff and 3 days a month doing product-engineer stuff. The reason is that, doing either activity, you gain an enormous amount of knowledge that's crucial to the other activity, but very difficult to even put into words, much less into a knowledge base. Bill Gates found it useful to answer tech support calls as late as 01989: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/289857 https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/289857
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    > Bill Gates found it useful to answer tech support calls as late as 01989 This is good, but it's easier when you're a very extraordinary human, and your own boss!
    - kragen 5y ago
      Yeah, but Bill Gates managed to do it too.

robertlagrant 5y ago

This is a tricky balance. Developers can also get overwhelmed with requests for estimates, automation tasks, etc etc, and get annoyed that people have so much contact with them. But it is a tricky balance; there's no obvious solution.

kragen 5y ago
Sometimes it's helpful to have some division of labor between field/sales/support engineers who go to handhold customers, understand their particular problems, and prototype fixes, and "product engineers" who have less customer interaction. This is somewhat similar to the SRE/SWE split at places like Google. If I were designing an organization with such a division of labor, those wouldn't be different job descriptions but different activities within a single job description; maybe I'd spend 22 days a month doing product-engineer stuff like adding features, and 3 days a month doing support-engineer stuff like visiting customer sites, diagnosing customer problems, and answering calls, while maybe hatchnyc would prefer to spend 22 days a month doing support-engineer stuff and 3 days a month doing product-engineer stuff. The reason is that, doing either activity, you gain an enormous amount of knowledge that's crucial to the other activity, but very difficult to even put into words, much less into a knowledge base. Bill Gates found it useful to answer tech support calls as late as 01989: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/289857 https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/289857
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  > Bill Gates found it useful to answer tech support calls as late as 01989 This is good, but it's easier when you're a very extraordinary human, and your own boss!
  - kragen 5y ago
    Yeah, but Bill Gates managed to do it too.