Comment by ThunderSizzle
8 hours ago
That's the difference between programming and software engineering.
A software engineer should be able to talk directly to customers to capture requirements, turn that into spec sheet, create an estimate and a bunch of work items, write the whole system (or involve other developers/engineers/programmers to woek on their work items), and finally be able to verify and test the whole system.
That entire role is software engineering. Many in the industry suck at most of the parts and only like the programming part.
I think the hardest part is requirements gathering (e.g. creating organized and detailed notes) and offloading work planned work to other developers in a neat way, generally speaking, based on what I see. In other words, human friction areas.
> That entire role is software engineering. Many in the industry suck at most of the parts and only like the programming part.
I'm always amused when I read anecdotes from a role siloed / heavily staffed tech orgs with all these various roles.
I've never had a spec handed to me in my career. My job has always been been end to end. Talk to users -> write spec into a ticket -> do the ticket -> test the feature -> document the feature -> deploy the feature -> support the feature in production from on-call rotation.
Often I have a few juniors or consultants working for me that I oversee doing parts of the implementation, but thats about it.
The talking to users part is where a lot of people fall down. It is not simply stenography. Remember most users are not domain/technical experts in the same things as you, and it's all just a negotiation.
It's teasing out what people actually want (cars vs faster horses), thinking on your feet fast enough to express tradeoffs (lots of cargo space vs fuel efficiency vs seating capacity vs acceleration) and finding the right cost/benefit balance on requirements (you said the car needs to go 1000 miles per tank but your commute is 30 miles.. what if..).
> I've never had a spec handed to me in my career.
We call those places "feature factories".
I have been required to talk with many in my life, I have never seen one add value to anything. (There are obvious reasons for that.) But yet, the dominant schools in management and law insist they are the correct way to create software, so they are the most common kind of employment position worldwide.
Careful with that though. The guy whose entire job is to "take requirements from the customers and bring them to the engineers" really does get awful tetchy if the engineers start presuming to fill his role. Ask me how I know.
How do you know?