Comment by maintenance | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maintenance | Hacker News Reader

As a mid-level developer myself, I am trying to internalize this advice around impact and about thinking from the user's perspective, but I fail to grasp what is perhaps a simple concept. Am I, as a developer, meant to grasp the domain, or even just the product I'm working on, at a level comparable to that of the intended user?

Say I'm working in the fintech industry, and my product is meant for financial specialists. For me to be able to come up with solutions that bring the most impact would require me to understand what a user of such systems might need. However, I'm very clearly not the intended user for my product. How do I bridge this gap? Am I looking at it wrong?

Edit: I'm not talking about strictly my product, but rather the product I'm working on, the company's product.

Funny you bring this up, I was just talking about this to someone else in a different context. I'm a pretty old dude for programming, I've been hacking in the field since the early 80's, and professionally developing for the last 25 years. Most people would be pretty unimpressed with my skill set, it's pretty much just "linear algebra", and I've basically solved the same 5 or 10 problems over and over again.

The thing that, I think, has given me a competitive advantage is that I put a significant amount of effort into learning the domain I'm working in. I've gone from health care system to theoretical physics to image processing to logistics to financial plumbing to electricity markets to obscure stuff for the War Department, and so on.

The value that you really provide to a customer is deeply understanding their domain and the problem they have in that domain and then translating that for a computer. If you're just taking tickets off of Jira and writing code without context you're no better than an LLM (just kidding...maybe).

So yes, I suggest that whatever field you're working in, you put the effort into learning the domain as well as practitioners in that domain. That's how you become valuable. It's not easy, but after a few iterations you start to see patterns and it becomes easier.

Maybe some of my bias is that when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail - or in my case: when you have a matrix everything looks like an eigenvalue. YMMV.

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