Ask HN: How to avoid cultural divide between business/tech? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to avoid cultural divide between business/tech?

2 pointsryeguy_241 comment

In most non-technology organizations (at least in finance), the stereotype culture is that business and technology are two separate teams. Technology pushes back on things and both protect their own self-interests. Rarely do they work cohesively as one time with joint feelings of ownership. I've always observed this and recently always blamed technology for this divide.

Then, for the first time, I worked on a project on the technology side and immediately adopted that mindset. I literally found myself saying things like "That's the businesses problem, we don't have to worry about that." Why does this happen? How can we avoid this behavior/culture?

Any tips on how to get teams to work better together?

The tech that runs a business and the business are inseparable. The tech team needs to learn the business enough to know why the business team needs certain features to work certain ways. The business team needs to learn enough about how software works to know that sometimes simple looking features are hard and take time. Both teams need leadership to know how to talk to each other to solve mismatched goals. It's very hard because most people only care about their own job and the goals they have set for themselves. It takes smaller egos from the tech team who thinks they know everything because they write the software, even if they don't understand why the business makes money, and it takes a patience from the business team to understand that the tech team is the caboose, the last step in the chain in the building of some feature, so any delays prior to actually building (like requesting vendor data to build a tool that takes longer than expected) night not be their fault and they still need the 2 weeks to build it even if the deadline is 1 week away.

Without the tech, the business fails. Without the business, the tech is useless. Both need each other.

Tl;dr: developers and businesspeople need to communicate and work together.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com