Me generalization is made from 20ish years as a dev who's now a CEO and was doing a bunch of hiring along the way.
You said my generalization was unfair, and carved out a narrow exception where it would be great. Maybe proving my point.
Query...does your dev team talk about tooling and stack more than customer feelings?
Is it "ohh react native on k8s" or fix the accounting reports and that one UI bug that tricks users into click the wrong button because some eng forgot to use the UI green constant?
The latter for sure. The platform is a nuisance and not a source of fun, and priorities come from product. But I’ve never worked in the US, things might be different. What I was trying to say is that people will adjust to the culture/goals of the workplace. It might be true that an engineer left to its own devices would not care, if it doesn’t affect his performance; but if it the company is clearly focused on the customer everyone will follow.
Yes, 100% at my Co now, we are (not just lip service) customer focused. After some bumps we got a new dev, was unhappy at the old places, specifically about that empowerment. Now the customer to dev feedback loop it tight and they are enjoying it - and it shows from the contribution.
> Devs and designers simply lack that customer-development focus
That’s an unfair generalization. They will have that focus if imbued on them by the company, and the right motivated hires are made.