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martinpwHNSource author
Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

Engineers have a perception that most other roles are lesser and if only they were allowed to be in …

Engineers have a perception that most other roles are lesser and if only they were allowed to be in charge things would go better. I certainly used to be this way. When I was an engineer I used to regularly engage directly with customers, and it was great to be able to talk with them one to one, address their specific issues and feel I was making a difference, particularly on a large product with many customers where you do not normally get to hear from customers much. Of course once these customers had my ear, the feature requests started to flow thick and fast, and I ended up spending way too much time on their specific issues. Which is just to say that I've changed my views over time. In retrospect, the customers I helped were ones that had the most interesting problems to me, that I knew I could solve, but they were usually not the changes that would have the biggest impact across the whole customer base. …

Original discussionLessons from 14 Years at Google687 source comments · at import
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AV
avidiaxHN

Every previous job I've had has a similar pattern. The engineer is not supposed to engage directly with the customer. I think there are multiple reasons for this, but they are mostly overlapping with preserving internal power structures. PM's don't want anecdotal user evidence that their vision of the product is incomplete. Engineering managers don't want user feedback to undermine perception of quality and derail "impactful" work that's already planned. Customer relations (or the support team, user study, whatever team actually should listen to the user directly) doesn't want you doing their job better than they can (with your intimate engineering and product knowledge). And they don't want you to undermine the "themes" or "sentiment" that they present to leadership. Legal doesn't want you admitting publicly that there could be any flaw in the product.

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WO
wood_spiritHN

It’s oblique but this puts me in mind of an old adage I recently heard about war: Of 100 men, one should be a warrior, nine should be soldiers, and 90 shouldn't be there at all. I think this is true of software developers too: only in companies, the 90% don’t really know they shouldn’t be there and they build a whole world of systems and projects that is parallel to what the company actually needs.

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liveoneggsHN

every customer complaint is N customers lost who don't say anything "the biggest impact" isn't knowable so a bird in hand is worth more than whatever might be in the bush

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RapzidHN

This reads like it was written by a PM. You lacked higher level context and prioritization skills early in your career so the take away is it's best to divest agency to others? There is a whole modern line of thinking that leaders should be providing the context and skills to give high performing teams MORE agency over their work streams.

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palataHN

> Engineers have a perception that most other roles are lesser Do they? I always felt I was at the bottom of the chain. "Moving up" means leaving engineering and going into management. > and if only they were allowed to be in charge things would go better. Could this be an oversimplification? Engineers understand how the product is built because they are the ones building it. And sometimes they are exposed to what other people (e.g. product people) have decided, and they know a better way. As an engineer, I am always fine if a product person listens to my saying that "doing it this way would be superior from my point of view", somehow manage to prove to me that they understood my points, but tell me that they will still go a different direction because there are other constraints. Now I have had many product people in my career who I found condescending: they would just dismiss my opinio…

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mixmastamykHN

An org can always go too far in the opposite direction, but this is not an excuse to never talk to the customer. The latter is much more likely, so the warning to not get “into bed” with the customer falls flat. This is a common pattern here. Alice says 0 degrees is too cold, I prefer 20C, Bob chimes in “100C is too hot, it’ll kill us.” Ok, well no one said or implied to crank it to one hundred.

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mike_hearnHN

Agree that this can be an issue but to clarify, I was finding bugs or missed outages, not gathering feature requests or trying to do product dev.

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