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324 points bilsbie | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.214s | source
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dcastonguay ◴[] No.44974574[source]
> At the end of it, they were sketching a completely different architecture without my "PMing". Because they finally understood who was actually using our product.

I cannot help but read this whole experience as: “We forced an engineer to take sales calls and we found out that the issue was that our PMs are doing a terrible job communicating between customer and engineering, and our DevOps engineer is more capable/actionable at turning customer needs into working solutions.”

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perrygeo ◴[] No.44975269[source]
Yep, notice there was no mention at all about why the original software was so ill-designed in the first place. Not even a curiosity as to why. Your conclusion is more valid, though I wouldn't necessarily place the blame on the PM. Agile/Scrum rituals, where blame is diffused and developers are forced to sprint quickly through poorly-designed tickets, yields poorly-designed software. Who could have guessed? Feels like a systematic problem with the "modern" bloated software organization.
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1. ryandrake ◴[] No.44975540[source]
The root cause I think is that nobody really cares. They're not paid extra to care, either. The PMs are putting checkboxes together and writing reports for their managers without really asking how what they are designing is going to actually be used, the engineers are turning each checkbox into code without wondering if what they are doing makes sense, and the project managers are making sure the train is running on time without regard for where the train is actually going. At the end of the day, the company's stonk goes up, everyone gets paid, and goes home to the family they care about and to do hobbies they actually care about. If any of these characters in the play goes above and beyond to do something wonderful, they aren't getting paid more, the stonks aren't going up higher, and the effort is usually just wasted. I'm not saying this is bad, either, it's just part of why products are so bad.