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Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

Conversely, when such feedback and communication is overlooked or ignored, over and over, engineers often stop giving it even when they are interested.

POs in my recent experience could benefit from listening more to their developers, who often know the domain much better than they do. (Or perhaps the wrong people are becoming POs)

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This, I've gotten pretty fed up with my current company because management just hands out work with no real explanation. Even more frustrating is that any significant technical design work is done in closed door meetings where the only people invited are development and product managers.

I've stopped giving feedback and I'm nearly at a point where I've stopped being interested. It frees up my mind and motivates me to work on my own projects on nights and weekends so I can actually have a say.

I've had this happen to me and seen it happen as a third party. It's a cultural issue and whilst I can see that difficult to change in large companies, startups with this mentality often demoralise developers quickly IME.

This is often how waterfall projects are/were run in large companies historically but now companies want agile everywhere but they don't implement the right processes to facilitate it. You end up with behind closed door decisions, promises made by PO that it will be done in the next sprint, and at no point has anyone with either the courage or technical know-how stepped in to point out that it's not feasible.

I bet that at the same time they also complain that devs aren't "engaged" enough!

> Conversely, when such feedback and communication is overlooked or ignored, over and over, engineers often stop giving it even when they are interested.

This is true but I find if I can explain why the feedback was overlooked, that can help diminish the negative feeling. It hasn't happened often in my experience but sometimes when it has, if the idea is feasible and won't detract too much from the critical path, I would push the business team a bit harder to allow it so as to avoid the constant ignoring feeling that can happen.

Yes. I've had both, in the same company. One PO that listens and encourages input, valuing it as highly as their own opinions...and another who actively pushes back on any input, who will dig in any time a suggestion is made, etc. The latter I just stop trying.

Unsurprisingly, the former tends to get things out on time to huge success, and the latter tends to be late, and it barely scrapes across the finish line.

I've been trying to get out of development for the last month. I've sent 180 CVs for business analyst roles. I've had 2 recruiters call me back, otherwise dead. This is the CV that the CTO of my last company helped me write. You don't get many ex technical product managers or business analysts because it's pretty much impossible to transition.

This was my experience too, and after speaking with recruiter friends, often the company doesn't know where this person would sit. The title is still quite new and whilst the job spec may imply technical, the reality often is that they still just want a full on Product person who happens to know some coding (as opposed to a full on coder who happens to be involved in product). I've generally just had to go in as an engineer and be promoted by showing them what TPM's value is first hand.

Yeah that was my plan over the last 10 years at 4 different companies. No dice. Now I'm so burned out on programming I can't bear to try it all again. I can't go back to programming, last job I became so depressed that I was regularly thinking about suicide. Now in stuck because I can't program and no one will take me for another job. I might end up working in a super market at this rate.

Hang in there.

I haven't lived through a burnout yet, but I can relate to being stuck and unhirable, where your only background is in programming. No one will touch you for work in a different field because they figure you'll flee for a more lucrative dev role. No one will touch you for anything related to software, because they figure something must be wrong with you if you have the slightest gap in related employment. Devs are in such high demand, anyone good can find another job immediately, they'd say. Now you're in a self-perpetuating rut, and if you complain about it in the wrong community (not HN of course!), you just get told you must suck. It's completely demoralizing.

Went through that after graduating during the "Great Recession" and failing to find a dev position within six months of graduating. Ultimately, I clawed my way up (with a lot of help) after years of depression and suicidal ideation.

You may be headed away from programming, not back into like I was, but I really want you to take away the kind of encouragement online that I never received. Best of luck.

Thanks so much. I needed some kind words :)

I'm travelling at the moment so please bear with me with the timings but email me at thekeyboardp "at" gmail "." com and please lets talk mate

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