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Comment by swalsh | Hacker News Reader

I have about 12 years of experience, occasionally I'll find myself really interested in some tech. But generally speaking, the technical problems don't interest me anymore. I find myself more fascinated with the business problems. But generally speaking, businesses have been structured to exclude the developer from these problems until it is dev time, in which case the problem is presented as "here's an issue, here's what we want you to build to fix it". So in general my passion has been lost. Finding a company where I can be present during the solution finding phase has been difficult with my pay level.

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Domain Driven Design.

As a dev you usually stumble upon it for the architecture / coding part. But those are just details. The Domain part is all about the business: where do you add value, what things you can outsource because they're not at the heart of your strategy, which projects should get your better people etc. So I think it can be a good bridge for people who come from tech and want to dabble in the business part of their company.

I worked for a small web-consulting agency for 3 years that allowed me to be a part of everything from the sit-down consultation with the client, to the estimation of engineering effort, to the design/build, and to the demo and support of the production version. Its not a given to have this access and you generally have to ask for it, but it is available to you if you ask.

Pros: I learned how to listen to customers, create proposals that tend to close, and upsell... all while being able to build the end product. This has helped me to close a good number of side projects after I moved back to working for larger companies.

Cons: The challenge working as an engineer in these small firms is that your resources are limited to the budget of the customer, which can be too small to do top-notch engineering work. You can generally find the balance without sacrificing too much quality, but you will never be completely satisfied with your work-product.

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