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Ask HN: Why can't programmers get along with business type people?

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Re: Ask HN: Why can't programmers get along with business type people?

#21

Post by cturner »

darklajid wrote: post #18

For me the division is mostly centered on quality. The sales I'm working with want me to ship whatever, ship fast. I want to ship quality. Since money always wins, this usually ends with me giving in, feeling bad about it and .. blaming the sales people for being short-sighted/focused on the immediate return only.

Something to keep in mind about quality - sometimes programmers spend ages doing something in a way that seems like the right way, and the end result is either unimpressive, or a disaster. That destroys goodwill.

A project manager who had a history of working with unreliable developers may be drawn to a mindset of only trusting near wins, or even distrusting elegance-based arguments.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't programmers get along with business type people?

#22

Post by junto » 

   "Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." 
   Rudyard Kipling
Jokes aside, I think the OP is generalizing. Personally I get on fine with the vast majority of business people.

I don't get on with people that are incompetent. I also don't get on with people who have a lot to learn but pretend they don't. Some of those are business people. Some of them are fellow programmers.

Normally business people (sales) have features in mind that they know (or think) customers want. Customers often think they want something to deliver a business process that solves a particular problem, but might not be the most efficient process. Programmers are concerned with the management and control of their code-base. Often programmers cannot see the financial or business case for a new feature request. In many cases, it isn't really their job to do so, but it does help to understand the requirement.

As a result the two parties often have problems seeing eye to eye. However, this is a good thing. If we agreed with everything business people wanted then we'd have applications full of features, many of which nobody wanted. If programmers got their way then we'd have applications that no clients would want to use and buy.

In general each party has a niche of knowledge that the others don't. When each party can learn to appreciate the experience and knowledge of the others, then they can work together successfully.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't programmers get along with business type people?

#23

Post by ownagefool »

Doing things right often sounds more complicated.

Business people who don't take the time to listen and understand what they're managing will pick what sounds like the path of least resistance.

If the buisness people cannot be reasoned with this will result in staff not telling them what they're really spending their time on.

At this point management either a) steps back or b) buckles down and micromanages.

Results: a) Unless there is some internal leadership within the team or you have rather good and motivated people, this will result in the team doing what they want, which will mostly be CV-Driven-Development or playing with the new shiney.

b) Important steps will be skipped, likely the team will feel the decisions are made outwith the group, yet the group suffers from the results of said decisions. Moral of the team will go down.

This isn't specific to programmers, any time you get management that's willing to bury their head in the sand and not understand their subject matter, you've got this problem. Team performance will go down and if this results in rotating non-technical management who all end up going down this road, you'll breed programmers that simply think all managers are useless.

This is the with career managers. The problem with technical managers is they often simply don't know how to manage. You want someone who can do both and who actually cares about delivering value to whomever your customer might be.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't programmers get along with business type people?

#26

Post by waps »

onion2k wrote: post #19

I believe it's largely down to short term goals versus long term goals. From the business perspective, the company should do things quickly because that means the jobs are more profitable, cashflow is stable, and the business team believe that they can always find more clients even if the product is horrible. This is the short term outlook. From the programmers perspective the company should do things slowly because…

I think you're being very optimistic about programmer motivations, to be honest.

> From the programmers perspective the company should do things slowly because that leads to more maintainable software, less technical debt, and higher quality products with fewer faults. Less money comes in, but the clients stick around for the quality goods. This is the long term outlook.

This is the good version. But as we all know, to some extent these factors play a role too :

1) programmers have lost the battle with the software's complexity, but are fighting to retain control of it. This can also be a manager.

2) programmers have invested in certain technical decisions (a programming language, framework, ... whatever) and are unwilling to consider swapping it out, even when it's obsolete

(We all have seen the database product used in large firms that started life as a windows application, and has "moved to the web". Instead of writing a web interface, these fine people have written something like a VNC server that runs the actual application, and a JavaScript client that just downloads the pixels, and sends mouse events to the server. Sigh)

3) Programmers are trying to solve an "interesting technical challenge" that they DO NOT HAVE. An example would be a datacenter management solution for a webhosting company. Automated failover, globally distributed RPC, horizontally scalable load balancers, nosql replicated datastores ... That's great if it takes 10% of their time (because every now and then, they do build a great system), it's a disaster if it takes 90% of their time. But since it is so much more interesting than solving customer 1538's problem with the current reporting system ...

4) programmers have formed a clique, and are "going for job security"

Given the organisations most programmers work in, I feel sympathy for people using factors like this. We all know how responsible banks' management is, so I do not think doing any of the above against them even approaches immoral actions.

But what I'd like to state is that as a young programmer, or project manager, approaching problems in large companies without looking for the above factors is likely to result in disaster.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't programmers get along with business type people?

#27

Post by kourt »

One source of conflict is that many "business type" tasks/projects can be fairly easily time-scoped: "a report about opportunities for our product in Poland" can be a 5 minute comparison of populations, or a multi-year PhD dissertation.

Technical work often has a more rigid "minimum viable solution": a civil engineer can't just give up on a bridge halfway over a river, nor can he say "I just skipped the wind loading calculations and hope the school buses don't run on windy days." Some types of software (especially embedded e.g., aerospace and automotive) have similar concerns about safety and warranty.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't programmers get along with business type people?

#28

Post by alien3d »

For me,im implement accounting.most customer want to follow their rule.no gap no frs or whatever.just request.customer need third party accountant to consult so smooth project.i see havoc in oracle e business and baan implementation.internal staff request non functional and destroy the good base erp.their vendor everyday meeting and meeting and day by day programmer left..

Re: Ask HN: Why can't programmers get along with business type people?

#29

Post by krmmalik »

I'm with onion2k on this one. It's mostly do to with differing mindsets and world views. I'm not a coder, I'm in Digital Marketing, but yesterday I had a meeting with management regards their Google Ads campaign. A simplistic overview of the dilemma I had yesterday: We need to collect data on how well their site is performing for which we need to run trial campaigns so that we can analyse data. The management team see it purely as an expense and don't see the value of the "learning" exercise. That causes a struggle. Now the result is that the campaign that will be run is already compromising the quality of the learning that we can do, and this because the "Business" people have to be answered to.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't programmers get along with business type people?

#30

Post by zura »

onion2k wrote: post #19

I believe it's largely down to short term goals versus long term goals. From the business perspective, the company should do things quickly because that means the jobs are more profitable, cashflow is stable, and the business team believe that they can always find more clients even if the product is horrible. This is the short term outlook. From the programmers perspective the company should do things slowly because…

Also, programmers are usually "to the point" people, while business people love buzzwords.
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