[simonbarker87]

Of the three places I’ve been a full time employed dev I only enjoyed working at the first.

This was a UK retailer, the other two were “tech” companies.

The retailer operated in the way the article describes, direct contact with the business, ability to unearth a problem and run with it, understanding that dev work isn’t just fingers on keyboard and sharing of full business context.

The other two had strict comms lines, not allowed to stray from the Jira board, rarely any contact with the business or users and no sharing of business context because “we don’t want to distract you” - completely missing the point that without the contact you rarely understand what the point of the work is.

[tetris11]

I've been in the first type of work my whole academic career. I'm definitely more of an informatician/sysadmin than a scientist, and despite being entrenched in the science for almost a decade I can tell you that I never developed a 'feel' for it - it was too specialised, and I lacked the ground knowledge to bridge the gap. A smarter man would have found the time, but in my defense even in a single field has too many subfields to delve into, and you simply cannot master them all.

The best projects, and when I'm most efficient at work, is when someone explains the input and describes the desired output in as most abstract way possible.

[whatshisface]

Well, science is more specialized than business, for example there is only one "MBA" but at least a hundred masters in science.

[jddj]

I think, though I'm not sure, that some people prefer the latter environment.

Having worked with teams which have preferred to work in as pure a technology environment as could be constructed while still providing value, I think this might be the "product focussed" (or not) distinction that people make about themselves on their CVs.

[simonbarker87]

To me “product focussed” is the situation the article describes, everyone thinks about the product (and therefore the business by extension)

Those who don’t like that work environment (so would prefer the latter two of my three dev jobs) would be tech focussed in my book.

It’s all semantics though

[jddj]

Yeah, that was the conclusion I reached as well. I might not have made it clear