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Comment by veave | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think there's a polite way to put this, but to be honest this comment is an excellent example of what the parent is talking about.

All companies have needs that engineers tend to be very poor at, and if the engineers are dominant and see the other members of the organization as parasites, that's a serious dysfunction and not by any means "normal".

Is there anything really special happening here? For a non-technical individual, it can be hard to tell when someone technical is providing value and when they are, to use the term in this post chain, being a parasite. A technical person has the same issues with non-technical people. I've seen different non-technical business areas have this issue with other non-technical areas. I've read reports where supposedly entire departments were cut and the result was that they mostly parasites and the business did better after losing them, along with times such a decision killed a company.

I'm not sure there is anything really special with engineers in this situation. It seems like one of many varieties of the same problem with telling who is producing value and who is faking the appearance of producing value.

Ultimately, the people making those decisions need to be technical enough to know. Having those decisions made purely by non-technical people is playing russian roulette. This is something that is in many ways easier in more technical domains because at least it's possible to semi-reliably see through the bullshit.

Yeah and I think an issue is how engineers think vs other people. What maybe seen as rude or negative is just an engineer optimizing for efficiency or technical correctness. Other people then tend to take things personally and attach emotion to situations where they are having to be corrected.

I have this play out repeatedly in my personal life. I've found I have to simply let people do the wrong things or fail a little bit and gently guide solutions. Otherwise there will be emotional pushback that entrenches their position.

"Optimising for efficiency" on a personal/personnel/social level is one of the most common forms of rudeness in every day life. It generally _is_ rudeness.

Only when that appreciation for optimization is not shared between all participants. It is equally correct that someone who is not interested in social minutia is having their time wasted by having it inflicted on them, and this, too, is rude.

Politeness, is of course, when you hate the other person so much that you waste their time with all the various social rituals.

> ...do the wrong things or fail a little bit and gently guide solutions

That's getting someone to change their mind 101. Not an engineer exclusive insight. I think a lot of "oh engineers are so rational that's why people think we're so rude" is just post hoc rationalization for poor social skills.

Based on what is it pretty clear that everything went downhill when engineers stopped calling the shots?

I don't know if it is normal or not, but it certainly shouldn't be.

I work for a 'hard' engineering company. Hard in the sense it makes physical things and does physical things. They don't give a shit about software and any of the engineering around it. And I consider that a pretty good deal from working at a finance place where I was doing support dev work on their data warehouse. There they just saw me as an expensive cost center (I was probably not paid enough in retro)

Anyway. Shoes on the other foot at SE.

What surprises me about SE is that it has all these smart people and a big community but it has let google and the parasites scrape it to death.

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