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From personal experience on the product side, if you want to be more involved with the business, I'd recommend you work on two things from this article. First, curiosity is an absolutely must have. Without it, you'll not be able to truly learn what a customer is looking for. Second, demonstrate you can "talk with another engineer" without manager facilitation. It's a signal of ownership that I guarantee people will notice.

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I've done both of these my entire career and no one ever cared, mostly because it's not remarkable.

Do you work somewhere that has a large management apparatus? These behaviors are sort of bare minimum expectation in smaller companies. It sounds like you perceived developers as a group to be mostly anti-social curmudgeons.

I've worked in large and small, with good and bad cultures. And to be clear, that is not my view of developers. I point it out because I agree with the author of the article that there are differences in companies. I'm sorry that those traits did not get you where you wanted, but they are not bare minimum in a lot of companies. I've walked engineers from their seats over to the counterpart's seat and have had others who do not go outside of their area due to an inaccurate belief that it's not what their manager wanted.

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