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Comment by meibo | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it would. I'd like to believe leadership in companies that exploit their workers know exactly what they're doing, grilling burgers for a day won't change that.

It might help in e.g. startups, but I think it'd have less of an impact than you think it will.

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I entered software engineering by making simple web tools for my job in customer support. For a while I continued making tools for the department and those were some of my most effective projects because I knew the domain intimately and what the pain points were and the mentality of my former colleagues so I knew what kind of UX would work for my users.

So I don't think it's managers who need this so much as engineers who can do something to help, because as a colleague put it, laziness is a powerful motivator for engineers.

If engineers aren't working closely with the end-users who do each piece of work their systems directly support most frequently on a regular basis in the course of development, doing deliveries once (whether that's one delivery or one shift) a month won't make up for that fundamental process defect, and if they are, then it won't add anything meaningful for what that process already provides.

These days it's a lucky accident when the engineers and the end users are on the same continent and maybe speak the same language. The business will certainly optimize for lowest cost until it becomes so bad that it's impossible to overlook.

Managing by walking around is still amazingly more successful than managing by arbitrary metrics, but it's still rare.

> These days it's a lucky accident when the engineers and the end users are on the same continent and maybe speak the same language

Seems to me that dealing with that is even more of a problem with requiring engineers to do one particular class of the work one day a month as it is for having the engineers engage with those during the work as part of product design and development, so I’m not sure what relevance it has to the present discussion.

That sounds like every company everywhere.

Engineers are usually far removed

Its not just exploitation, the way managers imagine the work is done is very different from how it really gets done. Imagining how things work is never exactly how it works and you cant imagine how far off you could be. We've all been surprised by reality.

There's some amount of overlap between what workers perceive as painful or abusive practices or systems and things that are flat out wasteful or pointless. Sometimes the pointlessness is what pisses people off.

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