Comment by ragall
20 days ago
> But it's never been the case that a dev could just focus on technical things and not spend any time figuring out the context they are working in, and behaving accordingly.
This is factually wrong. Until a few decades ago in tech, and it's still like that in most economic sectors and I dare say most countries, it's the managers that take the role of figuring out the organization and interfacing with other teams. An engineer being only in charge of technical issues but nothing business-related was the norm; that would yield no promotion into management, of course, but still the norm.
Yes, but it goes more far than that: You will have to participate in meetings, you will be asked to joing for a lunch, you will be asked to contact a customer/devcontact there, you will be asked to attend some events, you will be asked to communicate with others etc.
You are not existing as isolated particle in vacuum behind your screen :-)
IDK, at many large orgs...there are developers that essentially communicate through "tickets" and "their lead"... and Def never talk to "business" people or customers. It's not very rare if you get a large enough org.
In other large orgs, the managers are in a parallel universe playing status games while the devs self-organize to get anything done. The soft skills involved in doing that wind up being completely invisible to the status universe.
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I have seen a number of organizations throughout my 20 ish year career that have a policy of “developers don’t meet with customers”.
I am not endorsing it and I think it’s poor form, but it absolutely exists. You are in a weird bubble if you think there haven’t been engineering jobs where a dev could only care about code.