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Comment by jagtesh | Hacker News Reader

> You could _almost_ argue that some jobs, like PM, UX researcher, designer, digital marketeer largely exist because of the narrow mindedness of engineers

I'd argue it's a simple division of labor. Engineers need to stay focused on solving technical challenges. Also, when it comes to PM - it's more than just writing product stories or prioritizing them. Doing stakeholder interviews is as art. Asking the right questions is crucial.

So while Engineers stay focused on the how, the PM stays focused on the what. And the UX translates the what into an interactive map easily understood by target audience.

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well, no. They are different jobs, that require skills that an engineer is not required to have. It's not just mindest, it's about methods and skills and theoretical backgrounds. UX is about eliciting the needs, the knowledge, the mental models of the users and to contribute to create (digital) representations that help them (the users) to accomplish their goals. This is not what an engineer is asked to do, and not what (s)he has been trained to.

I think a frontend engineer needs to have both a very strong aesthetic design ability as well as engineering abilities. Marketing on the other hand is a different animal. A good marketer can sell bad code, U/X.

I worked in QA and I think this is similar. The best QA testers aren’t engineers because they don’t make assumptions. Marketers make assumptions but not about code but about human behavior like you said but I think this relates more to the U/X and marketing relationship vs the engineer to U/X relationship.

I completely disagree. Engineering at its core is about building useful solutions to real-world problems. If you're not considering the user (including the theory behind the user's interaction with your product), you're not embracing your role as an engineer holistically. If I was hiring engineers, that is exactly what I would be asking them to do.

There are only so many hours in the day.

We sell a complicated product for professional designers. I am bad at using it and I don't have a great understanding of user workflows. I could learn more about that but then I would have less time to read our huge codebase and figure out how it works.

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