Programmers Lose Touch with Users as they Climb Career Ladder
I have become extremely concerned that many people who work in the Bay Area—or who work for companies based in the Bay Area—have, in the large, forgotten that their users are fellow human beings. I am turning more and more to the belief that _everyone_ in a company needs to have some unfiltered interaction with the company’s users on a regular basis.
Separating out the support process (to automation, to contractors, etc.) makes it easy to forget you’re not writing code to serve robots, you’re writing code to serve people.
replygambiting 11 hours ago [-]
I work for a large games company(as a programmer) and recently visited our customer support centre – man, it really hit hard realizing how much impact our product has on people, and how shielded you can be as a programmer from this impact. They played some calls for us, where people weren’t even upset that our game wasn’t working or the servers were down – they were just sad, they were at a difficult moment in their lives and our games would cheer them up, or they took a day off work to play, or they were ill and playing multiplayer with their friends was a highlight of their day – it just made me realize that if we break something, people care, and not just in a “I paid my money I want my game!!!” kind of way. As a programmer you work through your list of tasks and go home, especially in large companies the impact of what you do is hiding behind layers of customer support, community managers etc, where if it filters down to you it’s already been diluted to a sterile bug description at best.
replyOne of the sad side-effects of moving upwards in the programmer career path can be the loss of direct contact with system users. It was greatly gratifying to sit beside users in the office where I started to develop, to see what their actual needs were and to be able to provide solutions.
As part of a larger team of programmers one is shielded from those situations, and explicitly not allowed to make those decisions. It can probably not be any other way, but something is lost in translation.
replyblasdel 1 hour ago [-]
For better or worse the opposite happens at AWS
The upper parts of the developer career path as an individual contributor have more direct contact with system users
replyTAForObvReasons 3 hours ago [-]
I think it’s possible to move up and still maintain empathy. The problem is the Silicon Valley mentality captured by the expression “move fast and break things”. This frees you to disregard externalities and do what you want. As a result of that mentality, you actively try to forget the people on the other side. And “things” slowly expands to include everything from laws to social norms to human life.
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