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Comment by majkinetor | Hacker News Reader

I have exactly the same experience as you. I tried educating people but all those developers (and beyond, up to stakeholders), no matter their seniority, do not want to get involved in the domain too much, just as little as they need. That naturally leads to me micromanaging all the things, leading to non scalability and finally overburn. As soon as I stop doing micro, all the stuff start to break down pretty fast. I wrote a book per project trying to get everyone on the same level but nah (more than 3000 pages in last decade, 20+ projects). Tried everything in hiring too, found almost nobody during all that time.

I am now off the previous work and will devote time to try AI, because I concluded it can't be worse than that.

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Reading this thread brought back fond memories of sitting with front-line staff and just chatting with them while watching them work from the corner of my eye. My gimmick was to turn up for morning tea (the staff were older ladies that took homemade cakes to work), and by lunchtime have some frustration of theirs resolved.

It’s such a great feeling when you can make someone’s work better, for the life of me I can’t understand why others wouldn’t jump at the opportunity!

Sadly at current $dayjob, the devs are held at arm's length from the customer. On purpose!

Same here. No matter how hard I try, and use different approaches, from coaching, to sharing videos, through poiting out why this can benefit you personally, to showing how exactly it creates results, there simply is no interest. People don't care.

It's even worse than that - even the owner of the company I worked for didn't care that the product of his own company will be mediocre, while shouting generally the quality is the goal. It turns out that it was the goal as long as it was incidental and free (no such thing, but it looks that way if you are not deeply involved) and because it sounds good. As soon as reputation collides with the immediate profit, profit always wins.

Yuup. I do find that most of the time business decision makers actually have no clue about quality. Especially with software products if it looks like it works in the demo/looks pretty then the quality must be good right, and these engineers are just being pedantic, cause theyre engineers.

That’s something I relate too as well. I like working on different abstraction levels throughout the system.

Only way to cope was to let go things and pick my battles.

I always think about the joke where a sailor goes down to the dock and asks dock men if they speak French, English or German- dock men only shake their heads showing no. Later dock men chat and one saying to other he could learn languages so he would be able to talk with the sailor. The other replied that sailor knew 3 and it didn’t help him.

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