alt Hacker NewsDo the engineers not derive enjoyment in their jobs from making the customer experience better? This does track with what I've experience in my career, where we've gone from everything being to better the user experience to tech companies sort of trying to out-do each other in their technical solutions while the software continuously gets worse and more antagonistic.
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This is the danger of isolating engineering from customers, or even internal customer-interfacing employees.
If all they see is code, they will get satisfaction from tidy code, not user happiness. One good thing about AI is it elevates product engineers because they more directly bridge the customer-product-code divide.
There are plenty of projects that are green lit that have good intent but are bone headed when it comes to solution and implementation. Good engineers hate these types of projects. Good PMs try to avoid these at all costs but sometimes your hand gets forced because some VIP, either internal or external volun-tells you to do it.
> Do the engineers not derive enjoyment in their jobs from making the customer experience better?
Quite a few don't, no.
Different people derive enjoyment in different things and some of the best engineers do not find satisfaction in "delivering better customer experience" but in working with, and improving, cool technology. Its up to management to find areas of the business where they can deploy these people in a way that dove-tails with business success.
Its also the case that only working on projects that "deliver customer value", and having to justify every single endeavor through that lense, is how you end up in a local maxima in your tech stack, get mired in technical debt, and then get lapped by your competitors who have the foresight to work on foundational technology that enables future velocity.
To be frank, its endlessly frustrating that your median Hacker News poster doesn't get this, and instead prefer to brow-beat people about how they're caring about the wrong things.
Force me to click hundreds of buttons per release and I'm going to be disinclined to go through that. You wouldn't have a surgeon have to go hunting for the right tools.
Plenty of value comes from things the customer doesn't care about.
Customers want features as fast and as cheap as possible. I derive joy from solid test suites that avoid me getting paged while on call and team processes that don't allow config changes on Friday so pages don't happen on the weekend.
Very few craftspeople derive their joy from the customer experience. An electrician isn't happy because their work allows me to watch TV. A carpenter isn't happy because a new set of stairs lets me get to the basement faster. They're happy because of their perception of the quality of their work. This goes away when the visible or fun parts are no longer "their work"