The thing that's so frustrating to me--and many others, based on the comments--is how much of this gets pushed to management and product people.
Our team just acquired a product manager for the first time. And for the most part I absolutely adore her. She's really great at pacing things out to a timeline that works for us and pulling us out of our idea that a hacked up solution that you do in a couple of days isn't really a product. And she's very much pushing against putting those into production, all of which I agree with.
But she doesn't understand technology or needs. She's constantly having meetings where she pitches our manager on product ideas that don't even make sense compared to the client needs. Many of these are buzzword-based. But it makes me seem like an asshole where every team meeting, I have to be like, "No. That's not what the client asked for. The client asked for a solution to this problem x. The client (doesn't matter if it's internal or external) often doesn't know what the right solution is. Good product people and managers know that to get to a good place, the key is to get the client to describe the problem instead of the solution.
I'm not a product person. I don't know jack dick about products except for how to make them. But the level of miscommunication I see even in our small organization is astounding.
You get one manager, one product manager, and two stakeholders, and one engineer in a meeting together. It's absolutely unbelievable to me what management and product take away from those meetings.
It's so far from the reality of the problem to be solved that it sometimes makes me nuts. Like it has today.
I think that our whole way of doing things and our hierarchy is completely broken and backwards. You want to get something done? Put a software engineer in a room with an operations person who is on the ground. Talk about the problem. Propose a solution.
Take it to the management and let them sort out priorities among themselves. This bullshit about management being the first point of contact virtually guarantees that buzzword-based development is going to happen.
I know that we are supposed to be the sacred cows, and that we need to be protected. Fuck that, I say. Let me interact with the people on the ground whose problems I'm trying to solve. Don't put a non-technical product person who doesn't get any of the details right between me and the end-user. I'll take the time out of my day two days per week to go to the office and have meetings, and I do the rest at home where I can be productive and write code.
Sorry for the rant, but fuck all of this. We have a very broken system, in most cases.
Our team just acquired a product manager for the first time. And for the most part I absolutely adore her. She's really great at pacing things out to a timeline that works for us and pulling us out of our idea that a hacked up solution that you do in a couple of days isn't really a product. And she's very much pushing against putting those into production, all of which I agree with.
But she doesn't understand technology or needs. She's constantly having meetings where she pitches our manager on product ideas that don't even make sense compared to the client needs. Many of these are buzzword-based. But it makes me seem like an asshole where every team meeting, I have to be like, "No. That's not what the client asked for. The client asked for a solution to this problem x. The client (doesn't matter if it's internal or external) often doesn't know what the right solution is. Good product people and managers know that to get to a good place, the key is to get the client to describe the problem instead of the solution.
I'm not a product person. I don't know jack dick about products except for how to make them. But the level of miscommunication I see even in our small organization is astounding.
You get one manager, one product manager, and two stakeholders, and one engineer in a meeting together. It's absolutely unbelievable to me what management and product take away from those meetings.
It's so far from the reality of the problem to be solved that it sometimes makes me nuts. Like it has today.
I think that our whole way of doing things and our hierarchy is completely broken and backwards. You want to get something done? Put a software engineer in a room with an operations person who is on the ground. Talk about the problem. Propose a solution.
Take it to the management and let them sort out priorities among themselves. This bullshit about management being the first point of contact virtually guarantees that buzzword-based development is going to happen.
I know that we are supposed to be the sacred cows, and that we need to be protected. Fuck that, I say. Let me interact with the people on the ground whose problems I'm trying to solve. Don't put a non-technical product person who doesn't get any of the details right between me and the end-user. I'll take the time out of my day two days per week to go to the office and have meetings, and I do the rest at home where I can be productive and write code.
Sorry for the rant, but fuck all of this. We have a very broken system, in most cases.
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