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Comment by pdntspa | Hacker News Reader

I love most of the things around writing code but absolutely despise all the people that have popped up around it. Software engineering feels like a jobs program where we let nontechnical freeloaders figure out how to insert themselves into our process. I think that part of the reason that software sucks so much now is that the people designing it don't love software and technology the way we do, and it shows. I think we need to get nontechnical people OUT of our process and encourage more to be obsessive technical "lifers" and not corporate randos with business degrees trying to tell us how to make stuff.

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There are plenty of non-technical people who have made my life happier. The more effective managers and business consultants/owners find a way of making my life easier by avoiding road blocks and taking on work that I didn't want to do anyways. The more frustrating ones would find arbitrary limits to my ability to produce or micro-manage.

This isn't an everyone problem, this is an acute number of people who made production harder. By its nature, truly incompetent employees are eventually weeded out (assuming you're not in a dinosaur bureaucracy). If you're constantly finding that you're unable to work with the nontechnical side of your companies, you should start to question if you're part of this problem.

I think a critical reduction of your praise of good/effective non-technical people is: They made your life easier by triaging with all the other non-technical people.

I wouldn't assert that this isn't valuable in most organizations; but it drives further into the OP's point that if non-technical people weren't involved in the process, things would simply Be Better; and large swaths of very real, numerous organizations do feel like work programs for people inventing work for themselves.

Allow me to tell a story: I take on an epic of work. The final stage of this epic of work is to build out some UI stuff for a feature. Things get missed, we're approaching this final phase, boss says "oh crap, we need to coordinate with design to get some designs; I'll set up a meeting". The soonest they can get us in is two weeks. I spend three days twiddling my thumbs, then decide to Just Do It. We have component libraries; its like five UI components on an admin dashboard; just do it. I implement it; deploy to staging; then DM one of the designers "hey, I just released a new UI feature; if you have ten minutes today do you mind taking a look and giving feedback?" He had one piece of excellent feedback, I implemented it, and we shipped.

Allow me to tell another story: Two days ago, someone from customer support DMs me and says "We got a security vulnerability report (links to ticket); are y'all the right team to look at this?" We were. I PR the fix, share with the team, done.

Third story: Customer support DMs again. Hey we got a report from a customer about some odd behavior on this endpoint. Me: "Do you mind opening a ticket? That just helps us track it a bit better." "Sure man no problem (links ticket)". "Gravy my dude, I'll take a look at that tomorrow, sound good?" "Awesome!"

There's nothing about any of these stories that would fly with many MBA Orgs' idea of "The Software Engineering Process". They certainly don't fly with our process. It still happens. Why not? Once you start asking five-whys down the reasoning behind things like "it causes interruptions" or "engineers don't like talking to people" you eventually arrive at something proximate to: The MBAs invented a sandbox to justify their existence, they're here on a VC-fueled work program, and everyone has to play in their sandbox.

Things are not better in that sandbox. Companies are less efficient. Employees have higher average misery. Revenues grow slower. But many are blind to it because the MBAs, if nothing else, are great at Talking Good, and we don't know anything else.

(To be extremely clear: I'm adopting the terminology of previous comments, but think "technical" to mean "product-oriented", Product Managers and Designers count, and "MBAs" to mean "People & Process Oriented". Ex-Engineering Engineering Managers are gray area; but I think once you start viewing that role through the lens of buzzwords MBAs love like "Leaders" e.g. "To Lead Your People" e.g. "Inspire" "Mentor" etc; they can only be technical, and need to be more Product-oriented than People/Process-Oriented.)

Great stories. For me the behavior you've described is what I see in a lot of experienced/senior devs. They're not just good at programming and building things, they're also good at interacting with other people to make things happen in a way that's efficient and brings value to the business.

Code does not make money by itself. Business does. Code has to work for business. And if programmers can manage business, nothing like it. But someone has to. You can rarely have it both ways, code for fun and make money for the business too. And make no mistake, running a business is as difficult as building software if not more. If we assume that 'non-tech' people do not understand code, we can assume that 'tech' folks do not understand business too. Both of which are not true. Also, such a flaming rant on any other topic would be flagged out to oblivion. HN's predisposition with tech vs nontech is quite apparent.

> HN's predisposition with tech vs nontech is quite apparent.

What do you think this place is? The word "Hacker" is right in the name!

Just think, if this was "Businessperson News" (aka LinkedIn) you'd be seeing the samey agreeable groupthink drivel and probably not be exposed to the opinions of important stakeholders that are often overlooked by management types.

Totally agree. I have some hope that the current high-profile layoffs makes (at least some) non-technical people to leave the industry. I have even started seeing more and more developers that have 0 interest in programming and are in it for the money, and it shows.

The great outsourcing panic of the late 90's and early 00's was pretty great at weeding out those who didn't care one bit about code.

Anecdotally, but a new grad was telling me a number of his peers in college had the explicit goal of not coding two years out of a CS degree. Most of them were eying PM positions or "Tech Evangelist" roles.

I saw this exact same thing when studying CS in the early 2000s. A bunch of people said they only wanted to write code for a couple of years then get an MBA and become managers. Sounded crazy to me!

I remember in a third year OS class overhearing a huddle where the consensus was that computer science was a great major, but programming sucked.

I was too traumatized to really process that for years ... lol.

It is very helpful to my recovery to hear of other somewhat similar(?) experiences!

i have interest in programming and i am in for the money, but the money is too small for the madness of the office

Precisely my feeling on this topic. We don't need scrum Masters, product managers and even most managers who are not technical. Too many people trying to have a say in something they have no expertise in. Basically software engineers are treated like a coding monkey.

We need assistants not managers most of the time.

Why are tech assistants not a thing?

That is what I find weird: when an Engineer spends the day fixing their PC or figuring out how to procure something. Assistants for that kind of stuff would be good. For small companies it might require a call out model rather than full time assistants.

Good luck handling software development, talking to customers, gathering requirements, aligning with other teams, doing marketing, writing budget requests - all by yourself.

pretty much what most PMs don't do exactly, they just take what managment says verbatium and just throw screenshots on top of another screenshot together without even bothering to properly account for most common states, research? user insights? etc.. it always goes like this: we made change x, our y metric increased. Waste of space.

in marketing companies "projects" were lead by people after sociology, they were called account managers - why?? now i have a product owner who's above me and has no technical background, never used a cms, after 8 months i understood finally that the dashboard iam discussing is a poor man's google analytics page, we are making it because for the last 2 years people were taking stuff from the database and presented web stats by hand - each day i get to uncover more and more and more stuff like that . those nontechnical people think that they are doing rocket science stuff. like genuinely.

The problem is not so much the roles themselves, it’s the number of non technical people who are staffing them. If someone has “paid their dues” as a developer, it’s easy to trust their product vision, their roadmap, their design, their architecture, their delegation/organisation and decision making. But if they haven’t, everyone feels uneasy and lacks confidence about the whole project. And the non-technical people themselves know this, and may even admit it - but either way it doesn’t change the night-and-day contrast.

I could imagine this could get worse. Incompetent CTO who likes a broken language and buy all the hype shit. This is how our job market is rotten.

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