

We’re Getting It Wrong - kohsuke
http://weregettingitwrong.com/

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kohsuke
Personally, I don't feel all that strongly that we are collectively getting it
wrong, certainly not to the extent of getting a domain name just for that! I
think most developers do indeed talk to their users, and they rather enjoy
doing it, too. I've once worked in a place where developers are more detached
from users, but that was an exception, not a norm.

There's also a difference between the opinion of one user vs the collective
opinions of users as a whole. In most software these are conflicting goals.
For example, iOS can't just add random features willy-nilly to satisfy an
individual's feedback. So the product management needs to come in between
developers and users to aggregate user demands. You'll have to make everyone a
little bit unhappy to make users collectively happier. One of the reasons I
like extensible software is that those two goals are no longer conflicting.
Hopefully you know what I mean when you see Jenkins ([http://jenkins-
ci.org/](http://jenkins-ci.org/))

I do share the joy of "caring about your users," there's something very
special in knowing this one person/user, understanding his/her needs, solving
it, and making him/her happy. We obviously do that through software, but this
drive is universal.

------
apwashere
_> For example, in my entire carrer in this industry, I can honestly say
without any exaggeration that I have never met a single person who was
obsessed about proving P != NP._

Fair point - an example related to inventing new datastructures would probably
have been slightly more realistic ;-)

I certainly agree with your point about "the challenge of the collective user"
from a PM perspective. I've worked on quite a few teams where this "collective
user" was more of a product of the marketing or PM team's imagination than
actually representative of real users, though - and even if you cannot please
all users all of the time, in my experience the more of those users are real,
the more motivated you are to try to please as many of them as you can.

Overall, very glad to hear there are lots of parts of the industry that are
doing a lot better than I have experienced!

Regards

ap

