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I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform

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324 points bilsbie | 1 comments | 21 Aug 25 15:46 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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dcastonguay ◴[21 Aug 25 16:17 UTC] 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 ◴[21 Aug 25 17:06 UTC] 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. rstuart4133 ◴[21 Aug 25 22:48 UTC] No.44979073[source]▶
> Yep, notice there was no mention at all about why the original software was so ill-designed in the first place.

All software is ill designed in the first place. Even software I write to solve my own problems will usually do a poor job of solving that problem on the first iteration.

There is a reason old engineers say: "Plan to throw the first one away. You will anyway."