[lotyrin]

All three of these categories are served by a product team that makes economical constraints explicit.

Too often business comes into the conversation with e.g. "We need a disaster recovery system" and no figures on desired RPO or RTO, no figures for what a minute's worth of business data, or a minute's worth of business activity costs or expected incidence or duration of outages from which even the True Engineer could derive suct figures. Too many organizations, when an individual engineering contributor starts asking questions about these business figures put on a face as if a dog started speaking to them instead of having answers.

It's somehow not seen as inevitable that we, in this vacuum of evidence, reach for all we have -- assumptions based on individual personal prejudice, or just whatever seems easy/fun/cool to implement.

Why should I do the effective thing when I don't get a bonus when the solution works, but I do get overtime pay (or reduced feature load in the sprint) when it fails?

Why should I do the simple thing when I could do the thing that I can put on my resumé and hope I can be a member of a team that either doesn't have a role called "Business Analyst" (because isn't that everyone's job?), or has such a role that actually performs analysis instead of just being a mouthpiece for management.

Sure, a good engineering manager will know this is what has happened, and will push for business to consider the economics of potential solutions and facilitate the decision to implement the solution with the lowest expected costs in the face of risks, but the common level of skill here, and all I've ever been privileged to work with can't process figures like these (everything is either unknown, a feeling, or - rarely - a single precise number, it is literally unthinkable to have a distribution of possible numbers or do maths on such figures), and won't notice their absence or seek them out.

[okhudeira]

Your points couldn't be more accurate. In any organization, the quality of the function that dictates the work to be done (be it Product Managers or Business Analysts) heavily impact the success of an engineer's work. Some organizations choose to remove this level of management [1], others have ensure only former engineers fill this role.

It's very important but broad topic. I chose to not explore it in the post because it deservers its own discussion.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Does-Stripe-have-product-managers-or-d...