upvote
> 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..).

reply
> 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.

reply
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.
reply
Are you talking about the "engineer talked to a customer and now both are mad at each other" trope?

While I have seen this happening it usually has nothing to do with engineers and more with that fact that talking to customers and identifying requirements is a task that requires respect and practice to become good at. Procentually I've seen more junior MBAs alienate customers than I have engineers seen do it.

reply
Please tell more.

I have the same impression. But that is where it is going - roles merging and being able to do the full spectrum will be valuable.

reply
Nothing much to tell. About 10 years ago on another job, I wanted more context in what I was building, so I suggested shadowing a user so I could see what they actually did, what value the software provided, and where the pain points were. A business analyst attached to my team became somewhat upset because she felt that impinged on her job. So there went that idea.
reply
How do you know?
reply