[healsjnr1]

That sounds amazing, sadly in a lot of organisations that isn't how it pans out.

Either the engagement with technology doesn't happen early enough, or when it does, the technology point of view isn't given the weight it deserves. The ideas have already caught and too many people are invested and have 'faith' it will all work out.

The crux of this is that many of those people who carry the weight in decision making don't actually carry any risk or responsibility for delivery. Given the scale of engineering and time to deliver, by the time it comes to fruition they've moved on, so they never experience accountability for ignoring the advice.

[disgruntledphd2]

It depends on the organisation, to be honest.

For instance, in my experience at a FAANG, the issue was often that a new technical solution was proposed, architected and built before any business/market people got involved with the result that loads of amazing, brilliantly architected and completely useless projects got built.

(My favourite time was when a (really smart, to be fair) software engineer rediscovered the normal distribution while looking for a way to reduce storage requirements for an analytics product).

[robertlagrant]

If you have a load of smart engineers, sometimes it can be a more successful strategy to just build something than to pay EY £250k to do market analysis, get a load of execs bought in who then will "make it work" even if it shouldn't, or kill it off even if they shouldn't, and then finally get a committee-written spec handed over to be built in a rush.

[disgruntledphd2]

Sure, there are pathologies at both ends of the spectrum. I do think it's worthwhile (particularly here), that software engineers/technical people are subject to their own set of development pathologies.

[robertlagrant]

That's fair, yes.

[PaulHoule]

The FANG method of software dev is extraordinarily expensive, particularly at the G.

[conductr]

True. I’ve witness all of these things as well. I’m not implying that organizational decision making is perfect if only it had better technical people providing inputs by any means.

Again as a finance guy, this is a major skill I have attempted to develop for myself/team. When projects spin up, I’m typically at forefront and involved in every project technical or not (controlling the purse strings). Many finance guys are know it all’s TBH. They build their ROI models, etc. and making dozens of assumptions it’s then treated as gospel. For some reason, it’s valid to ask “why is this project underperforming our expectations” but it’s often taboo to ask “did our expectations even make sense”. I try to change that where it exists too.

All to say, people like me find people at the onset of the project to gather inputs. If I know you as well versed with track record of valuable insights, I’m more likely to reach out early. If I have worked with you at this stage and you your input is just one of “we need specs/tell us what to build and we can build it” you’ve not added any value to the conversation and I’m likely to not include you next time because I know I just need to bring you specs once project is approved and that’s a different conversation for another day.

This is why I say “business partner”. Being able to understand your company, the politics within, how decisions are made, where you can inject value along the way. These are all traits of people with fast career growth in slower growing firms. You transform from Programmer #13 to people knowing and respecting your name. This is important in talent reviews, etc.