Comment by steveBK123

> 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..).