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Comment by slumdev | Hacker News Reader

> I really fail to understand the logic that may make someone to think a software engineer, however brilliant, can write software for a domain they don’t understand.

This misunderstanding arises out of necessity to compensate for the lack of understanding of the value of nontechnical roles.

It's heartbreaking for BAs, POs, PMs, and every other flavor of functionary when they realize that, after some* years of experience, the programmers understand the business just as well as they do. And the programmers have countless other invaluable skills that the functionary could never understand if he studied for a hundred years.

*This length of time is variable. Depending on the business domain, it could be anywhere between 1 and 10 years.

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> after some* years of experience, the programmers understand the business just as well as they do.

I don't push back on the premise that there are some incredibly dumb non-engineers. But of all the people I've had to work with, engineers were among the best and the worst. The latter has to do with their dysfunctional level of focus and utter lack of creativity - not just in an artistic way, but also in terms of general imagination.

Here's a very common scenario:

- non-engineer: let's improve this by 10%.

- engineer: that will cost 40%.

- non-engineer: I get that. But our current 90% is not competitive.

- engineer: but it doesn't make sense to invest 40% to get 10%.

That's what separates great engineers from the high-IQ/low-EQ ones: they have taste, imagination, and common sense. Incidentally, the latter group tends to have less self-awareness than the former, and tends to think they are the only non-idiots in the world.

> It's heartbreaking for BAs, POs, PMs, and every other flavor of functionary when they realize that, after some* years of experience, the programmers understand the business just as well as they do.

Why heartbreaking? That should make it easier for everybody to do their job, and to do it better.

> It's heartbreaking for BAs, POs, PMs, and every other flavor of functionary when they realize that, after some* years of experience, the programmers understand the business just as well as they do.

Shouldn’t be. Very few engineers want to move to BA/PM/PO or management track.

Boeing management used to be grown from engineers. The person promoted would have been practicing "engineering in the large." I don't know if that's still true.

I think the point is there shouldn't be BA/PM/PO type people. It should just be engineers all the way.

Engineers who understand those roles exist and should be given the reins. Call them whatever but an engineer with domain knowledge is what you need for just about everything.

I’d be curious how well this scales.

We’ve had quite a bit of success moving to a product model for internal services. One thing I’ve observed though is that teams lacking strong PM/PO support tend to start looking inward to develop their roadmap rather than outward.

This ends up building little silos in which they are doing something and it’s generally executed well but when you explore their plans it can be hard to see how it connects to the larger view.

I've been tackling the opposite. Product specs their thing which is completely disconnected from the reality of what is actually needed. This creates massive levels of frustration for the end user.

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