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The plumber example is quite good, but I prefer the modern car mechanic that connects a computer to a car and reads out things usually even they don't understand which have to be fixed and no one can explain anything but 'engine bad'. Most of the Product people I work with and have worked with collapse easily under technical arguments, but most engineers I work with barely know what they are doing. Only yesterday I (external consultant) asked the tech lead to scp a file from a to b during a workshop zoom where I showed them how to use some new tools and, while he always talked in front of the cto and head product about ssh and scp and his linux chops, he had no clue; he started to download gui tools (windows) and after he was done he still couldn't. I ended up copying the f'ing file to chat (I have no access to their internal systems). This is the guy they trust with core products dev that runs the company. He gets away with it because he talks in difficult tech bla to the cto and product (both MBAs); he keeps using terms from kubernetes (they don't use kubernetes and the guy cannot use docker) and 'things he did in the past' at 'much larger companies' and you can see Product go to his happy place during calls. In the end he lets tech do whatever they want as he understands nothing and gets so much tech babble that he cannot even figure out what to ask. We (small company fixing emergency tech stuff; for this client, it turns out that the emergency is basically their tech department; it's staffed with 100% incompetent people who are decades out of date) hop around a lot and this is very very common; on HN we read about flowers and fairy tales of covering tests, 10x programmers, migrations, kubernetes/containers, git, security etc; in reality however people are sending zip files with dates in them, updating the prod db manually and copy pasting files in whatsapp because they don't understand ssh works (what even IS there to understand ...) and tests? What is that? And these are companies that make more than your startup will ever make statistically. I am going to say that generally the plumber gets his way in the world, the fear of leaks, water or sewage, is enough for people who know nothing about plumbing (it's all pipes!). |