[bproctor]

I like that attitude very much and I think it can be extended to everyone. As someone who's straddling the line between developer and manager I've sometime found that difficult but try to be as supportive as possible. The project managers where I work all seem to think developers are children that need a babysitter. The lack of respect is infuriating.

[perspectivep]

> The lack of respect is infuriating.

That's why I hate things like hackathons. We need people to think of us as engineers rather than tinkerers, and the labels we accept aren't helping.

[TheOtherHobbes]

It's more like lack of experience. The wonderful thing about engineering is that most people literally can't imagine how hard it is, and how complicated the systems they rely on are.

All they see is a lightswitch that works and a phone that runs apps and makes calls.

They don't know anything about distributing power across a national power grid while minimising losses and keeping phases synchronised, metallurgy, ceramics, plastics and organic chemistry, industrial injection moulding and machining, data compression and coding, compiler design, radio frequency and microwave circuit design, microprocessor manufacture, automated assembly, adaptive digital signal processing, optoelectronics and display technologies, networking protocols - and so on.

For them it all just works, even if the software is often a bit crap.

99% of the complexity is invisible, so they have no clue it's there - and you can't value something you don't know about.

[erikb]

Just had a discussion with a friend that we humans really have a hard time to understand the complexities of things we don't know. The less we know the more we think we know (and vice versa).

The only way I found to handle that is trying to be very careful when I feel 100% sure something is as I think it is. But sometimes you are so sure of yourself that you don't even realise that.

[existencebox]

I've definitely felt that sentiment as well. What both backs my "feeling" and hints at the heart of things is in something I've heard said verbatim on multiple occasions: "We need to do X; I don't even need to be an engineer to understand it" where X is a deep engineering topic, e.g. a full re-architect of a relational backed platform as streaming. (Also, "PM work is far more difficult than engineering work" said by a just hired PM to the faces of the 4 senior engineers assigned under him... you can imagine how that went).

For the former quote I've found there to be hope, since you can engage the "it's so easy, I see how you can do it" the same way _we_ engage ourselves, making them deconstruct the problem to the end of running them into a common design issue (in my sample it was asking the PM to reason about long-horizon backfill and replay logic); it can even have a positive outcome if you explain it such that the PM gains trust in your insight, and may help to build some of that respect.

In the latter, when there is simply as you say a LACK of respect, and not just a... shall we say communication gap? Those are the situations I've seen some of the more painful PM/dev interactions and I have far less helpful advice, unfortunately, since I'll admit that the problem then resonates, as eng loses respect for PMs who don't respect them and etc etc.

Sorry for the ramble, this has been a topic I've thought about a lot WRT "implicit problems in scaling a company past a certain size"

[jdavis703]

It's probably because they are. I've worked at one place where the engineers were children (I was also an engineer there). For example in one stand-up the participants refused to stand, other times all you'd hear were "dog ate my homework" type excuses for why a project or story was running late. This was usually more team specific, and I started to learn how to avoid the more childish teams. Shockingly management treated the more mature teams with more respect.

[erikb]

Yeah that can happen as well. I was just lucky enough to have not worked in that kind of environment yet. Maybe because I am also an engineer at heart I think too highly of us, but in contrast to many other jobs I believe that engineers have a higher desire to deliver good work (even if the definition of good is different for everyone). Therefore the engineers I know often push themselves, to some degree even harder than management pushes them.

[mercer]

> but in contrast to many other jobs I believe that engineers have a higher desire to deliver good work (even if the definition of good is different for everyone)

That's my experience too. But your parenthetical remark is a very important point!

I've been in plenty of situations where an engineer cared too much about delivering 'good' work by their own definition of good, when clearly it clearly wasn't 'good' for the company/team/product. In fact, I've been that engineer myself a few times, where only in hindsight I realized that I didn't see the bigger picture.

[JamesBarney]

I'm curious, what were the "dog ate my homework" excuses you got for why a story or project was running late?

[jdavis703]

For example "I didn't have any Internet so I couldn't work" (this is in SF, you can tether your phone, go to a cafe, go home and work, etc).

[erikb]

This lack of respect is also infuriating for me. But the reason is also that I was a developer before I became a PM.