Readit NewsDead Comment
Ironically, it is hard because it doesn't consider the user. Scope documents likely seem reasonable for the author living in their own little bubble, dismissing it as something "trivial", but if they actually had to use it like those on the receiving end they would soon realize how horrid and ill-conceived it is. Much like was learned in the original link, once you stop with the bad practices, things become much easier.
Doesn’t matter if you drive VS Code every day though, because that means You Know Better (tm), and to hell with the discovery process.
I actually wouldn’t have a problem with pulling engineers into those discovery exercises directly, except when I have, they’ve just refused to engage. Come out without asking many questions and seemingly haven’t listened to a thing.
It’s like engineers just think it’s all beneath them, (and I accept I was a bit like that when I was engineering), so forcing them to do the calls isn’t an awful idea.
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.”
1. They assume they know more than everyone else. Got a guy who has had a problem for 5 years and tried 20 different solutions? The engineers will spend 10 minutes thinking about it, come up with a solution (that won't work, but they insist it will) and dismiss the problem as "trivial", and think the guy is an idiot. I've done it myself (which I'm embarrassed to admit), and I've seen it at every level from junior to Staff/Principal in companies large and small. The lack of modesty in software engineering teams is perhaps my #1 peeve with the industry. As a result, they often end up designing terrible solutions.
2. Once they understand a problem and a solution, they are frequently awful at thinking through the solution from the user perspective unless they themselves have experienced the problem. This isn't unusual, it's hard to build detailed empathy for how something should work unless you try it yourself. It can be very challenging to get buy-in for a UX or a UI from engineers without it, so sometimes it's useful to get them sat in the chair trying to do the work themselves.
I'm a TPM (former engineer and engineering manager), who has to regularly wear the "product manager" hat. I can not understate how hard it is to get engineers to read a scope document, understand it, accept that the thing needs to be built, that it needs to be built a certain way from a functional perspective, and while they have free reign on architecture and how it's built, it is not their job to rip each detail to shreds assuming the users, PMs and everyone else involved up to that point isn't a completely brainless moron.
This solution is relatively elegant. He got them to talk to users about the software they built and made them realise they were focusing on the wrong details. That's good. It doesn't mean the engineers can become product managers though.
You still need the PM to own the product long-term, and to deal with the customer relationships as the thing gets built. I will also guarantee that those engineers proposed changes the PM had to push back on because of constraints outside of the engineering team's heads (legal, compliance, needed by customer X, and so on).
Edit: read down into the thread, and this company doesn't have product managers. So he's just hoping engineers can figure it out. Fair enough, the only way to develop that muscle though is to get them in front of customers regularly.
Finally, who cares about millions saved (while considering the above introduced risk), when trillions are on the line?
AI today is terrible at replacing humans, but OK at enhancing them.
Everyone who gets that is going to find gains - real gains, and fast - and everyone who doesn't, is going to end up spending a lot of money getting into an almost irreversible mistake.
My problem is we're not all talking about the same thing when we talk about "The iPad". Right now, on sale today, there are four iPads to choose from. No, not different colours, or memory sizes - you need to make a choice between the Mini, the Air, the Pro and the regular iPad.
Want a desktop? Cool, you've got the iMac, the Mini, the Studio, and the Pro. Within each of those you have choices on processor, memory, storage and more.
Or maybe you just want a phone. Cool. Want the 16, the 16e, the 16 Pro, or the 15? They're all on the Apple store right now.
None of these have anything on the Watch (Series 10, Ultra 2, SE, Nike or Hermes).
I think it can hard to work out where each device sits in your life, but then there are spectrums and overlaps between them, and this is confusing for the consumer. Should I buy a high-end phone and spend a little less on an iPad and see it as just a bigger screen? Or should I get the last generation phone, splurge on an iPad Pro, and then maybe I don't need as much in the way of a Mac?
When you're selling a lifestyle, you need to be coherent. It used to be the case that Apple was coherent, but this choice is making customers confused.
I'd love to see a paired back offering and have more clarity and delineation. Do that, and this "is an iPad a laptop replacement?" becomes a more redundant question, and this idea of "betrayal" can go away.
By comparison, on my work network (TalkTalk) I can resolve the domain but I get a connection reset from the site.
I think this might be the first time I've hit a DNS block. It feels rather eerie seeing people talking about a site that, from my point of view, doesn't even exist...
There are a lot of legitimate reasons to want to use scraping sites that UK copyright law is not nuanced enough to protect, and so blanket bans just end up emerging at the demands of copyright owners (which more often than not, means Disney or Springer).
The interesting thing for me about this particular tale is the commercial genesis of Airbus and the incentives of the management team have led it to catch up despite Boeing have a 20-year head start.
When you're not totally absorbed by the share price, and instead you're trying to build a sustainable long-term business that can pay off decades (or generations), later, you get to make decisions that lead to a more sustainable and trusted business.
The UK has lots of new cars (plenty of cheap financing around for lease, PCP and HP deals), and there is a low-level epidemic of thefts of vehicles that end up in shipping containers and heading out of the country within hours. [0]
Car insurance is also so high in the UK at background levels that if you end up owning a highly desirable and very easy to steal car (the Range Rover a few years ago, for example), the costs being added to price in the risk of your car ending up in a container heading to the Middle East don't seem - as a percentage - particularly high.
The fact UK has great shipping throughput to the Middle East, Africa, and so on, is both a boon economically, but also it makes great cover for all sorts of shenanigans.
[0] https://www.containerlift.co.uk/cracking-the-code-uk-police-...