alt Hacker News> It feels like software developers are scientists who study their customers' knowledge domains.
I agree so much with this. It's why I feel so stifled when an e.g. product manager tries to insulate and isolate me from the people who I'm trying to serve -- you (or a collective of yous) need to have access to both expertise in the domain you're serving, and expertise in the method of service, in order to develop an appropriate and satisfactory solution. Unnecessary games of telephone make it much harder for anyone to build an internal theory of the domain, which is absolutely essential for applying your engineering skills appropriately.
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This might be an indicator that PM isn't doing their job; PM should be able to answer you questions regarding what the business wants (= people who you're trying to serve). Developers, by the nature of interacting with domain, do become experts in the domain, but really it should be up to PM what the domain should be doing business-wise.
This is why at my current place we are not supposed to do any dev without an SME on the call. We do the development and share the screen and get immediate feedback as we are working in real time! It's great.
> so stifled when an e.g. product manager
Another facet of this is my annoyance at other developers when they persistently incurious about the domain. (Thankfully, this has not been too common.)
I don't just mean when there are tight deadlines, or there's a customer-from-heck who insists they always know best, but as their default mode of operation. I imagine it's like a gardener who cares only about the catalogue of tools, and just wants the bare-minimum knowledge to deal with any particular set of green thingies in the dirt.