Most developers don't speak to users | Hacker News Reader

Most developers don't speak to users

7 points_1bq316 comments

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Personally, interacting with users can be a source of great joy (it can also be a source of great consternation).

I've typically found it much better to interact with the person you're making the dog food for so that you can get their rapid feedback and know where you either talked past each other, the user realized something new, etc.

Because that's what we do. We solve problems for users. Ideally we solve more problems than we create (jury is still out of that though).

My favorite anecdote was one day walking through the plant and we walked by a lady who was cutting up one of the reports we generate, reordering the lines, gluing them to a piece of paper so that she could photocopy it.

"Did you know that we can do that for you?" we asked. "Really!?"

Half hour later she had her report, sorted properly -- forever.

This was the transition from the Mainframe culture to our more responsive "Mini" culture. She had learned over the years to be content with what she got and make it work.

Interacting with users, AND (big AND) having the power to respond to them can be very fulfilling.

This seems to be a poorly disguised consultancy ad, rather than an insightful article.

> Most developers don't speak to users

Maybe so, but I really don't believe it's beyond most software engineers today to spend a bit of time talking to users, flicking through (or perhaps answering a handful of) support tickets or dog-fooding the product (if it's B2C). It's 100% given me an appreciation of what actually matters to the users who are part of the target demographic, and what their pain points are. Sometimes that's different to my own idea of what deserves focus; sometimes there's overlap.

At a small company, you often don't have a choice but to wear these hats. I personally think the experience of working with smaller orgs has made me a better engineer in the long run. Larger companies seem to focus on moving engineers further away from end-users and using folks who don't understand the codebase, system architecture or technical specifics of the domain to come up with product requirements.

I'm the poster, and it's not about advertising per se (I have enough clients and work, to not spruke here). It's about testing the validity of my view about modern software development (being largely broken), hence I'm really interested in comments from people such as yourself. Speaking openly and honestly about the actual 'on the ground' experiences of many, many developers seems to be absent, in consultancy services, in agile transformations, in organisations themselves.

Had a boss once who told a room of developers who argued for changes to the software. If you don't talk to users you don't have a vote. It was only after becoming an entrepreneur and facing that same dilemma with a coder working for me that I truly appreciated what he was saying ;<).

Many decision makers only talk to other decision makers across the corporate boundaries, so that the people nominally leading the software devs are never interacting with the people who actually use the software either, just the people who purchase the software.

Better software requirements for development teams and their managers, who don’t collaborate directly with end users and business stakeholders, but still need to produce excellent software.

There's not a lot of incentive to try harder. Office Space had a bit about this.

I've never worked at a company like this, sounds hellish.

Isn't that the job of product managers and sales people?

I'd say it isn't: as a developer, you are continuously making decisions that affect the user. The better you understand the user, the better your decisions will be.

It's a game of telephone, the fewer intermediaries the better.

That makes the assumption that the two people on the line can speak the same “language”.

No, it makes the assumption that given inevitable loss of information between any two nodes, the fewer edges the better.

I’ll remember that the next time I am on a telephone with someone who doesn’t speak my language or I their language…that there will be a minimal loss of information being passed between us.

At a recent job, product actively intervened with dev trying to talk to users

At all levels

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