[threeseed]

> They will expect you to do all the real hard work while they sit in meetings all day making UI mockups and architecture diagrams

You could also look at this the other way.

They are the ones doing the real hard work i.e. making tough decisions, dealing with stakeholders, incomplete and poorly conceived requirements whilst you just get to build what's written down on a page.

Everyone plays their role in companies and assume they are the indispensable ones.

[DrDroop]

I think the point of the article was that to be valuable as an engineer you have to do things like "making tough decisions, dealing with stakeholders, incomplete and poorly conceived requirements". My problem is that a lot of people have your attitude and pretend that they are doing me a favour by having this being written down all the while limiting the actual design space for a problem, and in the same breath patronise me on what teamwork is really like.

[pavlov]

If you want to do that work, have you looked for ways you could get involved?

Or if it’s the case that you’re actually doing that work behind the scenes because the output from the PMs isn’t very useful, have you looked for ways to make your contribution more visible?

[sanitycheck]

Oh, how I laughed.

Mostly they just pass those things on to the developers to deal with. Then we have to figure out how to bypass them and communicate with the stakeholders ourselves to figure out what the real requirements are and what we can build which solves their problem and yet is still broadly recognisable as the specified deliverable.

After that, coding it is easy.