[klodolph]

Seems like there are some steps missing between the quoted at the beginning and the outrage in the article. I don’t really understand the specifics of the complaint.

My main thought reading the quote at the top is, “you shouldn’t call people ‘neckbeards’”. But it is also true that not all engineers want to talk to customers. Don’t judge a fish by how well they ride a bicycle, and all that. “It takes all kinds” is a beautiful expression to sum that up.

[computronus]

By my reading, the outrage is likely coming from the cushioned stereotyping from the podcast participant. They're stating that "neckbeard types" and autists aren't customer-ready and are uncomfortable talking with customers. That second part is worse because it may lead to assuming that those folks would never want to talk to customers, or even learn how, and so the PMs might "protect" them by never offering them the chance, while assuring themselves "that's okay, that's great, I mean it takes all kinds".

[neilv]

There's a lot of value in the entire product team understanding the customer/user.

My interpretation of the piece so far is that it's suggesting that leaders think about their role wrt to this as like the party host, who figures out how to facilitate socializing by each individual, to make the party successful. Rather than as the chess master, who keeps everything to themself in their head (and there's a lot of pawns).

I'll have to mull that over, but I do have plenty of anecdotes that would seem to support that.

[klodolph]

> There's a lot of value in the entire product team understanding the customer/user.

This has to be the most common fallacious line of thought that I see in discussions about roles and experiences at work.

Whether something has a lot of value is, well, irrelevant. There are just too many different things that provide a lot of value to the team. The problem is that things that provide value come with a cost and sometimes with harsh tradeoffs.

If you decide that everybody on your engineering team must interact with customers, then maybe you get the value—but you also drive away some valuable team members who don’t like customer-facing roles. Your team becomes more homogeneous and you lose some diversity of thought. Most teams need a combination of viewpoints to succeed—we don’t just need to develop our customer focus, but also our focus on tech, on operations, on finance, on personnel, etc.

Another way I see this fallacious reasoning pop up is when people say that managers should be engineers or have an engineering background… because managers are better managers if they have an engineering background. All other factors being equal, this is true! But a lot of similar things are true, like how engineers would be better engineers if the had management backgrounds. We must accept some level of specialization because specialization is good for the team. Specialization doesn’t just mean that people have additional skills, it also means that people are missing skills.

[neilv]

I intentionally said "understanding the customer", rather than "being customer-facing".

I was kinda acknowledging a relatively uncontroversial point on which the article was predicated, before moving on responding to the parent comment with my interpretation of the more novel contribution of the article.

Agreed about a lot of things having value, diversity of viewpoints and skillsets also having value and being a reality, that not everyone wants to be customer-facing, and the importance of not emphasizing one bit of folk wisdom to the exclusion of other wisdom.

[klodolph]

Okay, maybe I just don’t understand the flow of the conversation here. Too many referents, not enough clarity about which referents we’re talking about.