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Ask HN: Founders, what is the worst experience you had with developers?

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Re: Ask HN: Founders, what is the worst experience you had with developers?

#101
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think many of these issues are caused by a "silo" mentality. Decisions often flow from the business end through product before finally ending up as a story in the developers backlog. How can the devs understand the business decisions and learn to make less academic slides if they are not exposed to the business? I worked at a medium sized business where devs had lunch with sales/product/marketing and was treated as…

I agree with your points about exposure - however - these problems generally do not exist in other parts of organizations. Devs are unique in their peculiar aspect disdain for 'management and business'. And unfortunately it's very rare that devs get such exposure but we agree it'd be great if they could.

Devs are unique but I would argue it's less of the dev mentality and more about how management and business can incorporate them as part of the decision-making process.

Granted technical folk are a special breed but being technical myself and having moved over to the business side of things, it's still equally important to think about motivation for devs.

To maintain engagement, I bring my technical guys with me to meetings where they can add value. And I always press about the value of meetings and what we're trying to get out of it.

Re: Ask HN: Founders, what is the worst experience you had with developers?

#102
We had a developer who worked on one of our projects. After he left, it was a disaster. Our new developers discovered that the names and items he used were strange and not related to what it should do. So the devs needed to go through all codes, figure out what it's doing and rename the code. It took a lot of time...

Re: Ask HN: Founders, what is the worst experience you had with developers?

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that many developers often sweat about minute technical details but completely ignore business goals. I'm involved in the local dev community and after meetups we often go for drinks. You almost never hear people talking about their company's successes, growth, strategy etc. It's all about the new hot tech they've recently had a chance to use. This mentality is reflected in the way they carry themselves a…

Thank you; a concise way of articulating what I had to write 10 paragraphs (below) to say.

Are developers really allowed to to think about business?
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