Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

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Last few bigger companies I was in, as a developer, I was involved in multiple meetings, often with different project managers for different projects. The one constant was me (and a couple other devs), being involved in meetings with marketing projects, financial reporting projects, upcoming IT purchasing decisions, operational IT issues, and more. Guess what? The developers involved in these meetings had a pretty solid view of the entire business. Yet almost any time a suggestion was made by a developer based on info from other project meetings, it was shot down or dismissed. (not 100% of the time, but close). I saw this behaviour at 3 companies of varying sizes (between 150 and 2000 employees).

Developer suggestions were generally based on a broader view of the business' overall needs (because of the breadth of discussions we were involved in) than other people at table had, which apparently can be threatening, regardless of how you present things politically.

I realize not everyone as a developer gets in those situations. Sometimes you're chained to one project and set of people for months on end. If you're not, you can have a much better view of the business needs, but that doesn't mean anyone will listen to you as a developer. You need to move out from being perceived as such - either by changing jobs to another company, or occasionally within a company. I've never had the latter option work out for me, but have seen a couple people do that successfully.

Even though you felt you went to more meetings and therefore had a "broader view of the business", perhaps the project managers also attended meetings that you were not involved in, which gave them insights you could not have possibly known? For example, maybe during weekly PM meetings where all PMs gave an update of the projects they were managing, your PM also developed a strong sense of what was going on in the business? Maybe the PMs attended meetings where the corporate strategy was discussed, which you did not attend?

Not recognizing that others may have vantage points that were unknown to me was a tough lesson to learn, but an important one. It's difficult to speculate on what someone else may know or not know.

In some cases that may have been true, but in most cases it was not. This spoke to poor company communication more than any awesomeness people think that I think I possess.

I usually assume that the suits are usually normal people and good programmers are usually smart people. That doesn't mean that what a smart person says will be listened.

You have to see the world like them, think like them and, especially, talk like them. You have to understand their incentives in the company. Etc. If you don't make clear for them why your proposal is beneficial (to them, not to the company), then you lose.

"If you don't make clear for them why your proposal is beneficial (to them, not to the company), then you lose."

Fair point - basic human nature - but then people need to stop saying "you (developer) don't understand the business needs or the company's needs". I understand them quite well. If "the company" continues to employ people who need constant ego stroking every 5 minutes, then they'll continue to bounce along, and I'll go sell my skills to one of their competitors who is more open to input from all levels (to the extent any of those exist in that industry!) :)

Well, companies' needs and suits' needs intersect at some point. You have to be smart enough to see that intersection and to propose things that look good on both sides.

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