Hacker News Reader

Comment by et1337 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve never understood engineers who complain about vague specs… if the spec was complete, it would be code and the job would be done already! Getting a 20 page spec delivered from upon high and mechanically translating it to code without any chance to send feedback up the chain sounds like… a compiler.

View on HN

In my experience, the complaints are not about the specs and their vagueness. It's more about the political game to get them detailed. If you've not encountered the kind of organizational issues where getting an answer is like pulling teeth, you're kind of lucky.

Oh no, I’ve definitely experienced that, it’s terrible. But that situation makes me wish for more agency (for example, talking to customers directly), whereas it seems to make other engineers wish for less agency (please hand me a complete spec and I will mindlessly translate it to code). That’s what I don’t understand.

some of us couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the customer. One of our customers charges people for paying their own bills via certain methods, which is completely bogus and I remind everyone loudly all the time that they do this. Everyone agrees that this customer sucks to work with, and the less time spent with them the better. The people from the customer’s end suck, they’re not technical, they have in-fighting with their own teams during calls, have decades long errors with their integration that they have never fixed…the list goes on. For this customer and a few others, please give me a spec that I can implement, shove it back across the aisle, and forget about. The absolute last thing I want is to have to talk to them more.

Yes, I don't think a job where I am programmed by a product manager would be terribly interesting. I would move on to be the product manager if I found myself in such a role.

Probably why I haven't ended up in any.

The demands are for functional requirements. Plenty to translate on the non functional side of things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com