Ask Lemmy

I've worked very closely with engineers and I'm engineering adjacent myself. Most of the highly technical types I know in every field (myself included) struggle to talk to people about their job because they no longer know what normal people do or don't know and they don't want to come across as condecendong. Like for me the basic refrigeration cycle feels like something everyone should know but I logically know that actually isn't the case and at the same time I don't know where the laymans actual knowledge on the topic begins. Like do I need to start with explaining that boiling liquids remove heat? Do I need to start with what boiling even is? Do normal people even know that things boil at different temps at different pressures? If I start explaining any of this are they jist going to look at me like I'm an ass and say "Of course I know how thermodynamics works"? Eventually I just decide it's better to not to talk to them.

At the same time though, if you do manage to break the ice with them then you are more likely to sucessfully get a passionate stream of consiousness rant from them because they're passionate and now they know that you can be trusted not to see them as being condescending when they overexplain. Honestly the best way I've found to break the ice with technical types is to get them to start complaining about some part of their job. That also sounds like exactly what you're looking for if you're trying to make their jobs easier. But if they start seeing you as someone who it is safe to complain to then they will start seeing ypu as someone it is safe to talk to about other things.

Also as always there is a relevant XKCD.

https://xkcd.com/2501/

Sounds like a good old leadership trust issue. Unfortunately the only thing that solves that is time, beer (or other social activity), making yourself useful to them in other ways, and being honest with them.

If they're afraid of punishment you can always try an amnesty box. They put what they would say in the box, anonymously, and you discuss it without trying to figure out who submitted it. Even if it's obvious. Then they don't have to trust you so much as the process.

Maybe they see your job as pointless waste of their time. The engineers put it together with the limitted timeframe and budget they were given, and dont need someone to tell thwm how to suck eggs. They know whats broken and how to fix it and they know how to do it.

To make it worse, you will do none of the work but will take the majority of recognition as c suite will associate the change with consultation and not the more time or money allocated to rhe team.

The best time for analysis is at the start of the project as it reduces the learning and consultation. Now, its an uphill battle, and frankly, not needed.

Good luck to you. Sounds like you're working at the intersection of management meets reality, and nobody has extra love for a scrum master.

I can recommend honestly and incremental adoption. It will be difficult to eat this whole sandwich at once.

Maybe they just don't like Jira and hope you will go away if they don't engage with your process.

I work in a fairly toxic work environment.

The reasons I do what the engineers are doing are,

1. A lot of times people will ask me questions and I give them answers. Then something will go wrong and it will somehow be my fault that I didn't mention it to them (they didn't ask, and I don't know the specifics of what they are doing).

2. I have my own goals and projects for the year. Why should I give you a significant amount of my time when my salary/bonus will not reflect helping you in anyway.

3. Job security.

These might sound bad, but that is how it works in corporate America

Edit: It sounds like you need management on board with you before you can fully continue

As an engineer you learn to be very careful about what you say to non engineers.

A trivial example.

What if we make change x?

It'll make some things harder and some things easier.

One week later.

Why are you having problems? You said doing x would make things easier.

More complicated example.

Can this be used for real time control?

Define real time.

Just answer the question.

I can't it's a bad question. I need to know what you are trying to control.

Keep your promises and tell the truth. If you don’t keep your promises, be the first to acknowledge the failure.

I was an engineer for a long time and among my peers the problem we had with management was often that they had a slippery relationship with the truth.

Also, demonstrate forgiveness within the organization for technical mistakes. If your engineers don’t want to share the bad decisions they’ve made, look for aspects of your company culture that punish people who admit mistakes.

One example would be times when someone spoke about a mistake they made and then was relieved of responsibility because of it. That’s an example of punishing the admission of a technical mistake.

As an automation/software engineer that works with sysadmins I think there's a natural resistance to top-down initiatives or others meddling with their processes (i.e. they're the SMEs so just let them work). I could also see your line of questioning go into a decision to restructure and eliminate jobs.

In the first case (general change resistance) I think you'd need to come with numbers that show how expensive a dept is compared to industry standards or how inefficiency drives issues downstream.

In the second case the best way to show jobs as secure is to detail all the work that needs to be done, implying how foolish it would be to cut staff and miss even more deadlines.

hesitation because they’re worried about “incriminating” themselves

This is a hard one. Because this is not about engineers, but their nature as people.

An anecdote: A lawyer, once casually asked me - if I were to design a building (this was hypothetical, because I am not a civil engineer) and after construction, was to realise some mistake that would cost lives, would I go on to tell them about it - and his tone seemed like he considered it common sense that I won't report it.
So, at least in his mind, it is common sense that people hide their mistakes.

technical details

I am a kind of person that doesn't know that people find it difficult to understand concepts out of their domain (mostly because I understand most, well explained stuff, irrespective of domain) and if someone were to ask me about my work, I would easily wander into the details. After a few years of industry experience, realising that to not be the case, I tend to be more abstract.

If you want the engineers to tell you more in depth about the technical stuff, I'd suggest you to show them your aptitude to understand their stuff and you will see them going more into detail of it. I had a manager (kind of), who was also an engineer and used Linux on a regular basis. I found it easy to discuss more in depth regarding solutions (the product was using Linux too) due to his familiarity.

There are a few things you can do that will help make everyone's life easier.

First thing, ask engineering what can be done to reduce technical debt and then fight for it aggressively. This is often a hard sell to the product owners at first because it can increase the time it takes to produce new features, at least initially. In the long term, it will pay huge dividends to everyone involved.

When tech debt gets ignored on a new project, the timeline usually goes something like this:

• Project is barreling toward MVP at lightening speed. The Product owner said "move fast, break things" and engineering is delivering based on that mindset and everything seems to be going great.

• MVP is almost ready but uh oh! Now a new feature has been requested.

• "Move fast, break things" doesn't allow time for code that is easily understandable or extendable to fit new use case scenarios so a huge chunk of the codebase has to be rewritten to accommodate the new feature.

• Wash, rinse, repeat.

Without a major change in design philosophy, the cycle tends to get worse over time with small features requiring more and more extensive refactoring and the number of regression bugs skyrocketing. Not to mention the code base is now a disorganized, smoldering pile of spaghetti that every dev loathes having to work on. Stakeholders are unhappy. Customers are unhappy. Engineers are unhappy. Everyone is unhappy.

Second thing, talk to some actual users, people who are NOT involved in the project, to get their feedback. As an engineer, I like working on projects that add value to someone's life, or at least make their work day easier. I want the user experience to be positive. I want the features I'm working on to enhance that experience. I don't want to waste my time working on features that are completely useless and will be rejected by the users as such just because some VP who doesn't understand what the users want has a bright idea. I've experienced this a lot throughout my career and to some degree it's curbed my interest in software engineering, simply because I feel like a lot of my time and effort were wasted on projects or features that were DOA.

Probably they'd rather drink a dogshit milkshake every single morning than use fucking JIRA, and they're hoping you die of natural causes before you get a chance to force it on them.

Frankly, it's tiresome trying to describe technical details with business analysts who glaze over something you're passionate about, treating it like nerdsprak. If the engineer has spent any amount of time producing a solution, you can bet he's passionate and invested. Give credit where credit is due and don't sound like an obnoxious condescending douchbag when doing so. People can tell when a disinterested person is giving fake praise. It's quite different when a crowd of peers is giving recognition of a job well done. And no, you're probably not as smart as they are in their field of expertise.

Also, listen to their input. They don't want a product with their name going live with a feature the bean counters want, but the engineers know make the product worse. It's like a mom watching your daughter to go to prom with a cheap haircut because dad as too cheap to fork out for a perm. You know what I mean.

Install linux/*bsd on your work device (that you take into meetings). Respect from engineers will immediately skyrocket : D

https://media.tenor.com/rGSj2L2GVecAAAAM/on-the.gif

Accept "I have no idea" as an answer, and don't use it as an opportunity to push things in the direction you want.
learn to account for people being wrong, and don't punish them for it.

Engineers want to be accurate. They don't want to give answers that they're unsure about or just speculating.
Early in their careers they're often willing to, but that gets beaten out of them pretty quickly by people with deadlines. Expressing uncertainty often means the person interprets the answer in the direction they want, and then holds the engineer to that answer.
"It could be anywhere from 2-8 months I think, but we won't know until we're further into the design phase" is taken as 2 months, planned around, and then crunch Time starts when it starts to go over. Or revising an estimate once new information or changing requirements are revealed is treated as incompetence, even though more work taking more time is expected.

It's in the self interest of the engineer to be cagey. "I don't like to give estimates this early" is much harder to turn into a solid commitment than an earnest best estimate given the current known state of the project.

Similar for resources required or processes. Anything you don't say is unlikely to be held against you.

I’m an engineer for past 20 years ,and the moment I get a whiff of some biz person fluffing bullshit I check out. Not saying you’re like that but something to be mindful of

So be real, honest, straightforward, put in effort into understanding the technicals so youre not just a sales annoyance or engineers will write you off right away IMO

Also I don’t think some people realize how busy or hard engineering can be. I’ve been working my ass off on a ground up new product and a lot of stuff just falls to the wayside out of lack of time

There’s also !askelectronics@discuss.tchncs.de !engineering@sh.itjust.works among others

If you are saying things like 'I’m not interested in punishing anyone for past decisions or mistakes', I think I can see the problem.

Anecdote from my first job (software engineering): New manager wants to know what our team does and how our process and software works. Like, he really really wants to know it!

Okay, I book a timeslot and prepare some slides and an example; we have a meeting. I go over the high level stuff, getting more and more specific. (Each person on our team was responsible for end-to-end developing bootloaders for embedded HW.) When I got to the SW update process and what bit patterns the memory needs to have and how the packets of data are transmitted, he called off the meeting and I've never seen him since.

I guess, he didn't want to know THAT much after all.

As a software developer that's worked on a ton of legacy, home-grown, years old software systems, they may not be dodging the nitty gritty...they frankly don't know it.

Some of the systems I've had to work on were over a decade old and being maintained or patched by anybody that had a free minute(as in over 150 individual contributors over its life, 75% of which are no longer employed). So while I know what the main goal of the system is there are a bunch of little side responsibilities that nobody knows about. Like we need this thing but nobody will stick it on a roadmap or prioritize it so I'll just stick it in here as a bug fix. Now multiply that over however long that spaghetti bowl of code has been around for. So that means that code isn't documented, and likely doesn't have a ticket in Jira(because you mentioned it) explaining why it exists at all. So that leaves a lot of questions. Chances are your devs have come across some code like this and know they don't know what it does and expect to find more if they look. Tracking down why all that junk exists and if its still required can take a staggering amount of time. Trying to juggle that with your day to day is...not practical. So unless some time gets blocked out to actually answer those questions I find it unlikely that you'll get what you need.