It’s amazing the overhead the “traditional” or “agency” model brings with software development and how it reduces engineers to developers who just need to execute whatever it’s decided by people up the chain. No wonder autonomy, leverage, career progression and pay are all more limited in this setting. I wrote in more detail about exactly this “backwards” approach and its implications [1]

Compare this with how some of the fat-moving companies work. Instead of 7 different people (from BA and PM and a dedicated DevOps engineer etc etc and all the comms overhead) you have two people / roles: - Product & design: the “why” and “what” - Software engineers: the “how” and building/shipping. Note that these people are called engineers for good reason at these companies. While the article says “ A team full of great developers may not bring the expected outcomes if there’s poor communication.” - duh, at places I’m talking about, engineers communicate with each other without a project manager for the most part. In fact, decent comms is something these companies screen for during the interview process. And “DevOps” is part of the role: you build it, you own it. Of course, there would be platform-focused teams and program/feature teams.

These tech companies have other roles for sure: most notably, data scientists and other not-so-technical roles (marketing, operations, legal etc)

But by having one engineer own what companies like SteelKiwi have several people do, no wonder they’ll be able to move faster (less comms overhead), pay more (far more value per engineer) and provide more autonomy (you own solving the problem, not executing the task the BA and PM agreed on, and you’re not expected to understand anyway).

[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/what-silicon-valley-gets-...