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

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324 points bilsbie | 4 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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yen223 ◴[22 Aug 25 01:07 UTC] No.44980051[source]▶
The first rule of Hacker News comments is it's never the engineer's fault
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lmm ◴[22 Aug 25 06:11 UTC] No.44981496[source]▶
It can be the engineer's fault if it's an engineering mistake. But bad process is the fault of the people who control the process and bad product management is the fault of the people who control the product management.
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1. sfn42 ◴[22 Aug 25 13:32 UTC] No.44984481[source]▶
As a developer I work closely with my managers and designers etc to ensure that our project goes smoothly and that we create a good product. I don't necessarily decide what we build but I have a lot of ways to influence what we build and how.

We talk about stuff, we plan stuff, I chip in and people listen. Whenever I see devs complaining about how terrible their project management is I think to myself that the dev is probably at least partially responsible.

Maybe I'm just lucky to have good colleagues, but when I talk about software engineering topics people listen and take it seriously. I think that's a big part of our job as developers, we know the tech and we guide our managers just as they guide us. We're a team, we work together.

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2. lmm ◴[23 Aug 25 02:15 UTC] No.44992409[source]▶
In my experience the kind of project management that doesn't value engineering input on technical matters tends to be exactly the kind of project management that doesn't value engineering input on process changes.
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3. sfn42 ◴[24 Aug 25 14:13 UTC] No.45004388[source]▶
If I started a new job and it became clear to me that my superiors just wanted me to shut up and do what I'm told, I would be looking for a new job immediately.
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4. lmm ◴[25 Aug 25 07:41 UTC] No.45011318{3}[source]▶
Sure. But not everyone feels that way, or economic circumstances may be a factor.