“Software engineers don’t understand the problem they’re trying to solve, and don’t care to.”
“Software engineers don’t understand the problem they’re trying to solve, and don’t care to.”
But this is reversible. I've done coaching in large-company environments and it's not at all hard to wake developers up, to get them to care again. The hard part is changing the environment so that caring is rewarded, not punished.
I think this is unfair. Engineers usually have great (at least qualitative though often quantitative) insight into potential, cost, and complexity. The problem tends to be in getting that feedback back into "the room where it happens", the place where budgets are set, approvals are given, disputes are resolved, and performance is evaluated. In that room, there is usually a heavier presence by people who understand organizations, political concerns, messaging, and revenues. So when the cost and risk experts (the devs) are not in the room, of course we end up with overly complex, poorly understood products that chug along for a while and then become so massive that either:
a. the project collapses under its own weight
b. the project creates its own "gravitational pull" and starts pulling in resources to support itself; sometimes this is locked-in customers who cannot migrate away, sometimes this is locked-in enterprises who can't imagine how (and sometimes why) to kill it off
I face numerous examples in the sports-ticketing world all the time. For example, if you are going to a football game, what is the most important consideration to a fan? I say the most common priorities are:
1) nearness to midfield ("What yardline are my seats nearest?")
2) sun exposure ("Will I be baking in the sun all day? Do I need sunscreen? Will I be looking into the sun when trying to watch play on the field for a portion of the game?")
3) home vs. visitor side
4) elevation ("Am I low enough to see the players? Am I high enough to not be obscured by bench and media personnel?")
If you're designing the site/app and you've never been to a (an American) football game, you won't know these criteria are important.
Maybe a product genius can come up with better ways to sell shady stadium seats. But the technical contributors would be able to tell you that the shade-o-matic feature is layers of bad hacks that cost the company $X million a year in dev costs and astronomical security and maintenance risk since it is still running (partly) on old hand-configured Windows XP boxes using a hand-rolled UDP server library backed by an Access database. And that's for a key differentiator for the company.
Profit and success doesn't happen until both sides of the story are accounted for.
Software engineers don't solve problems, they implement solutions someone else thinks will solve a problem.
Really though, caring about what the problem is and trying to solve it means: 1) you work slower, 2) you ask a lot of questions, 3) you push back on things. Basically you're spending more mental effort trying to encapsulate what the problem is than the stakeholder.
Those things will often make people either hate you or think you're bad at your job.
Imagine studying about web design, accessibility and usability for many years. You feel that you have something to contribute to the design of any app.
Then the higher ups just hands you a spec and assigns you to a task to fix this bug/implement this feature without your input.
That's pretty damn demoralizing. It will just push you towards caring more about streamlining your own workflow to rather than care about the actual usability of the app.
Maybe that's the reason why there is so much interest in the in what workflow to use, what IDE/text editor to use, which languages to program in, etc.
(I'm aware that there's been some effort to extend the legal significance of the word "engineer" to the software industry, but I'm curious if that difference is actually in practice anywhere today)
Engineer invokes a sense of design, but so does programmer. When I started, there was no job where you just coded straight pseudocode specs. Business described the problem the way business does, and you had to convert that into a computer solution. Within that solution, different developers would own various parts of it.
I would say the entire process of having coders who design systems and coders that just write code is inherently broken. Businesses want to think of development as prod-ops, but it's more like book publishing. I'm of the mind that if a coder who designs a system in enough detail to write pseudocode, he should just write the application.
The better approach is have an architect/lead model subsystems and a general skeleton of the application, then have different teams implement the subsystems. Clearly defined interfaces on all inter-subsystem communications.