I had such a great company social night, talking with an engineer who got his start here ~5 year ago.
They were taking about how they just want people to have a well formed idea of what to build, to be able to hand off clear expectations, and let him roll. For curiosity sake I started asking about other times: has there been a time where you've felt on the line, been the one who has to figure out what to do?
They paused for a bit & then said yeah, actually... They had been battlefield promoted after two higher ups on a team had left & it was just them running this product. They said they had little idea what they were doing but the company trusted them & let them hack through it. They loved that time. Finding out what to doz being given problems and the freedom to solve it was a highlight of their life, they said.
A lot of people don't want to play the game. Especially when we are forced to collaborate with non-technicals, it's incredibly hard to justify and explain ourselves & to share power & compromise with these people who lack competency to judge, assess, negotiate.
The title here omits the gods truth as an option: we the engineers know & can assess & you the business/product don't have the technical chops to debate, nor do you understand what is to be built. The premise presented is "debate vs do" as they say it, as though product and product alone understands do. But I think most engineers live in pain and dissonance and sadness, feel an incredible impedance and struggle, because most businesses/product have only the faintest fragmentary fake propped idea of what do is. It's a fiction. And it's up to engineers to cobble together some vaguely competent rendition of the fairy tale nonsense product tells itself it's come up with and that engineers need to just do.
The phrasing here could not be more slanted. Run, engineer, run, from the dented terrors that would think their product sensibilities have fully flushed out the idea, that think there is no cause for "debate" or sussing out how really to do a things that think only to "do" what the master product says is necessary.
They were taking about how they just want people to have a well formed idea of what to build, to be able to hand off clear expectations, and let him roll. For curiosity sake I started asking about other times: has there been a time where you've felt on the line, been the one who has to figure out what to do?
They paused for a bit & then said yeah, actually... They had been battlefield promoted after two higher ups on a team had left & it was just them running this product. They said they had little idea what they were doing but the company trusted them & let them hack through it. They loved that time. Finding out what to doz being given problems and the freedom to solve it was a highlight of their life, they said.
A lot of people don't want to play the game. Especially when we are forced to collaborate with non-technicals, it's incredibly hard to justify and explain ourselves & to share power & compromise with these people who lack competency to judge, assess, negotiate.
The title here omits the gods truth as an option: we the engineers know & can assess & you the business/product don't have the technical chops to debate, nor do you understand what is to be built. The premise presented is "debate vs do" as they say it, as though product and product alone understands do. But I think most engineers live in pain and dissonance and sadness, feel an incredible impedance and struggle, because most businesses/product have only the faintest fragmentary fake propped idea of what do is. It's a fiction. And it's up to engineers to cobble together some vaguely competent rendition of the fairy tale nonsense product tells itself it's come up with and that engineers need to just do.
The phrasing here could not be more slanted. Run, engineer, run, from the dented terrors that would think their product sensibilities have fully flushed out the idea, that think there is no cause for "debate" or sussing out how really to do a things that think only to "do" what the master product says is necessary.