On: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not

[jrcplus]

I was at Apple during the golden SJ era and it was like this. I remember asking my manager (in my first year or so, fresh out of school) about something and he replied "That's what we're paying you for!"

I was at Skype during the eBay years and it was similar. Lots of autonomy. Then Skype got sold, Silverlake instituted Scrum training for everyone, and well, look what happened. Product owners took over; the engineers became Jira-ticket minions.

That said, I do understand the problem with giving engineers too much freedom, if there's not enough maturity on the business side. I've been at places like that, too. Engineers gone wild. Just burning money.

I see too many startups adopting Agile/Scrum for lack of a better clue on how to run software development. These days I refer people to Basecamp's Shape Up for "just enough" structure.

[rorykoehler → jrcplus]

We have product and tech roles in our company. Product always goes to tech for design and implementation advice. This is taken care of during sprint planning. I see product getting a lot of hate from engineering types recently. It just smacks of myopia. Engineers are being well paid because the company makes good money from the whole solution not just the technical implementation. What an engineer thinks is important may not be that important from the business perspective which is where product comes in. If product wants to do something that will cause technical problems that's where engineering comes in. It's a team effort. As an analogy no soccer team fields only goalkeepers or only strikers etc.