
What makes developers bad at business? - ivm
https://qotoqot.com/blog/blind-spots/
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mlthoughts2018
These are all strawmen in most cases. Most businesses operate software systems
that are perpetually at critical breaking points, riddled with tech debt,
long-unfixed bugs that severely degrade quality and actively make customers
unhappy but are not prioritized.

The business and product side always say things like not choosing projects
based on technical challenge, but that’s so extremely far away from the case
of reality that it’s just FUD to better politically control things.

Most engineers I have worked with are really clever generally and can quickly
grok sales or business considerations at a higher level than the sales or
business people can. They want to build things that customers care about and
don’t need anyone from sales or product hierarchies to “make” them follow that
priority. They only want to test new tech stack choices in careful, isolated
ways, not betting the farm on a new toy.

These are basically made up, misunderstood myths that business people tell
because they’re insecure that smart engineers are good enough to make both
engineering and business decisions.

And the flip side failure mode, where engineers are raising alarms about
serious tech debt issues or inflexibility / incapability to innovate, and
business people dismiss the seriousness of the issues in a genuine business
sense, is rampant.

As an engineer one of my most frustrating experiences is when, _after taking
business concerns into account very carefully_, my expert opinion that the
business outcome is at high risk of failure due to lack of engineering
investment and basic quality focus is just dismissed because “I’m not a
product person” or some similar bullshit self-preservation from soft-skilled
people writing Powerpoints all day while dismissing the idea that engineers
can learn the business (usually very quickly).

~~~
ivm
Interesting, you are not the first person to describe the article like "myths
that business people tell". But I've never worked around the "business
people": I'm a developer who has always been freelancing and bootstrapping.
All my previous clients were 1-10 person teams, mostly staffed with
developers.

This article is the result of my experience of trying to do business myself,
watching other developers trying, and talking with ones who would like to try
it one day.

But I agree, engineers can learn many of these skills quickly. My goal was to
list the biases.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
I can totally agree there are segments of the software industry where these
issues exist more meaningfully, like in your experience.

Internally to tech companies though, I think this sort of thing is trumpeted
around too much to try to shift the balance of decision making power away from
engineers. Sometimes of course engineers are not the ones in the position to
know all the relevant factors for decision making. But often they really are,
and if they tell you we can’t over-promise to the customer on XYZ because our
legacy code is reaching a critical failure state, it needs to be urgently
believed and trusted, but most of the time is not.

There’s often a fundamental incentive struggle between parties who get bonuses
or commissions because of a binary outcome (closed the sale, shipped the
feature, lost the customer, revenue less than the target), and people for whom
the binary event translates into long-term service requirements (support the
feature and backwards compatibility, deprioritize a critical version upgrade,
grow support capacity without being granted more headcount, etc.).

Ideally it should be based on situational evidence and technical details (both
business tech and engineering tech), and hopefully not just generic principles
(often invoked via confirmation bias or argument from authority) like in this
article.

~~~
ivm
Understood, thank you for the explanation.

I think I should have named it "bad at _starting_ a business" or something
similar. My intention was to help founders of startups or self-funded
projects, I don't know much about the dynamics in larger companies.

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jpincheira
I recently read an article, basically it said that we normally think we can
code and make a nice product but forget about marketing.

Marketing is the 3rd essential component in a product, and finding savvy
marketers is as hard as finding a really good engineer for your product.

As well, when hiring, a big mistake startups make is to hire samers. You
should be hiring people that don't do exactly what you've been doing, as
they're also going to be bringing creativity to your business in a way someone
doing your same craft cannot bring into the table.

