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Ask HN: What to do as a software engineer that cares more about what to build?

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Re: Ask HN: What to do as a software engineer that cares more about what to build?

#21

I think Paul Graham has an excellent article named Hacker and Painter regarding this. I think the only way is to develop your own products. So far I habe worked in a few companies as a business analyst and a bi developer but I have never seen one that allows the dev team to have some final say in the products. Products are always dictated by business team, then project manager or business analyst breaks them down to…

Thanks for the pointer to the article! Yeah, that's a good point. The PM is sometimes pretty constrained by the business. Maybe it's just a grass is greener thing. Have you been anywhere where the eng team had some say in what they make?

Currently working at PostHog, an engineering-centric product-led startup (20-odd people currently) all our engineering teams fully own an aspect of the product and prioritize themselves. Obviously there's company-wide context and company leadership has crucial input, but since hiring optimizes for maximally self-sufficient people, there's no PMs. I'm a big fan of that as an engineer

Re: Ask HN: What to do as a software engineer that cares more about what to build?

#23

The easiest way to do this is to go to a small company where everyone wears multiple hats. 50 people is probably the upper limit.

I agree with this as well. Around 50 people (maybe even 40) companies are required to start operating in a more bureaucratic way, and more often than not this means there's a top-down approach where software developers are just doing what they're told rather than influencing what gets built.
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