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Comment by lugg | Hacker News Reader

Im surprised you missed it.

Businesses solve this problem by hiring and training programmers in their business model and domain.

Coders, are worthless. Coders with business acumen and domain knowledge are invaluable.

This is also why I will never work with anyone with a job title of BA. They are trying to do my job but can only do one half of it. They're a pointless bottlekneck in the system.

And no, there is no place for BAs who can code only those who do. They're called software developers.

At this point I don't know if software engineer, developer, programmer or coder is really the right term any more.

I'm more of a systems analyst. The amount of time I spend coding is miniscule and I don't think I'm alone in this.

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That's a bit inflammatory... My experience with BA's is that they're like anyone else on a team. They are more skilled in certain areas, and they can provide a lot of value if their skills are used appropriately.

I've found BA's are very useful in the following areas specifically

- Communication with the market (either customers or in-market staff such as sales/support) to gather feedback about what they'd want

- Orchestrating decisions (asking all the dozen stakeholders what they want to do and arriving at a sensible conclusing)

- Arbitrating feature/UI decisions (people on the team aren't agreeing on whether we should do something or not)

- Documenting requirements (by this I mean the desired functionality that we believe customers need/want)

- Iterating and getting feedback on requirements

- there's more, but off the top of my head that's all I can think of

Sure, I as a lead developer have business knowledge and can also do the job of business analysis, but a dedicated BA will be able to spend more time doing that - increasing their skills, and freeing up me to do other things. If I take on all of the above tasks in a decent-sized project, it's going to suck up a huge amount of my time - in many cases almost all of it - so then basically I'm just a BA with a different job title. BA's are great if you learn to understand the role and how it can help a team

All of those things are what a developer worth anything to a company should be doing.

Similarly, BAs without business domain knowledge are even more worthless because of this.

I.e. consultant BAs are, as most of us know, a waste of money.

BAs are struggling to find a language to describe their business requirements in a way the programmer or computer can understand.

It's code. It's what programmers have been writing all along. That is the god damn language they need.

Given when then? If then else.

Surprise!

Ricardo strikes again. Relative comparative advantage says even if a developer is a better coder and BA, they're better off spending time coding and letting non coders be BAs to maximize overall throughput.

This assumes a BA is cheaper and more available than a programmer.

If they are cheaper, I guarantee you're going to have problems.

You're literally installing a weak link in the most crucial part of the chain.

BAs are by definition more available than developers, as all developers are BAs but not vice versa.

And given basic supply and demand they are cheaper.

Anyway read your Ricardo, you're right but wrong about the implications. Your development is an even weaker link in the chain because good developers are even rarer than good BAs.

> BAs are by definition more available than developers, as all developers are BAs but not vice versa.

Plenty of developers are not BAs. BAs are systems analysts with expertise in requirements elicitation (basically, goal-directed interviewing) and technically writing. Plenty of developers are neither systems analysts nor skilled at interviewing or technical writing.

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