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Comment by tppiotrowski | Hacker News Reader

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tppiotrowski

Get in the habit of asking: "What is the problem?"

CEO - "We need a live streaming video platform"

Me - "What is the problem?"

CEO - "I want to do a webcast on our website"

Me - "Would embedding a YouTube video player work? It does x, y and z and it can be ready by tomorrow"

CEO - "Oh! I hadn't considered that"

You need to get back to first principles. Usually your boss wants to accomplish something and then they come up with a solution. Then they fall in love with the solution, not the problem.

You should be asking your boss what they're trying to accomplish instead of letting them propose the solution. If you help devise the solution/product you'll be much happier building it.

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Never that simple at a macro level. Business will claim more knowledge of the “market” and are probably right if they have got feedback from customers. “We need to build X as part of our strategy”

Sure you can choose to use nodejs instead of ruby or embed video instead of streaming it yourself or find a better confit system than admin pages but the entire product ideas are probably decided by the business well in advance of when the developer gets whiff of it.

Imagine you are about to purchase a car and the car dealer weirdly tries to convince you to take up cycling via “what’s the problem”. You’d probably walk to the next dealer as you’ve made up your mind you want a car.

Maybe it's more of a startup thing. Another startup I worked at turned their entire website into an SPA over the course of 12 months. The website was never broken. It wasn't sleek but it worked. I kept my head down and rewrote it.

The email order confirmations, however, took 30 minutes to be delivered to customers. In the end, it was this uncertainty of whether an order went through that killed the customers trust, not the fact that it was not an SPA. I wish I had asked more questions instead of blindly following orders.

Haha. Yes, I do that potentially a bit too much. It always feels like pulling teeth -- like the official process doesn't have room for that kind of back and forth. For example, in scrum, the product owner is meant to have that conversation, not the engineers.

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