Your job is not to tell us how to do our job

<i>Does 2% of our user base use IE8 on Windows XP and the expected revenue from those sources is less than the cost of supporting that platform? Then I’m sorry, but they can fuck right off. That’s not worth the time it takes to support.</i><p>That decision is absolutely <i>not</i> the place of the developer. Failing to support a particularly market segment has implications far broader than simply the bottom line dollar value of each user. Even if those users bring in <i>zero revenue</i> it can still be worthwhile developing the code base so that they&#x27;re supported. This sort of thing is an example of something that you, as a developer, simply aren&#x27;t equipped with the necessary information or knowledge to make decisions about on your own - it <i>has</i> to be a collective decision informed by developers, marketers, product managers, and C-level managers.<p>A trivial example - the decision whether or not to go with a single page Javascript application design versus rendering pages on the server can be influenced by user demographics but have a <i>massive</i> impact on <i>everything</i> in the business from hardware costs to how you integrate payment reporting in to the workflow of the business.<p>Any developer who puts their needs in supporting particular users over the requirements of the company as a whole, frankly, probably ought to be shown the door. They don&#x27;t understand how the whole business process works and they will almost certainly screw up something really important later.

&quot;That’s not worth the time it takes to support.&quot;<p>THIS is wrong. What missing is the dialog behind what determines what is or isn&#x27;t &quot;worth the time&quot;. If you&#x27;re paid to dig ditches and you don&#x27;t like digging ditches... well, perhaps you should get the fuck out of the hole and get some other job.<p>Realize, it&#x27;s all about communication and that goes both ways. That it&#x27;s tedious to support something is irrelevant if the target market requires it. That YOU don&#x27;t like it, well, get out of that ditch. FAR too many &quot;developers&quot; fail to make this point effectively. Yes, at a certain point there&#x27;s a diminishing amount of return. But not without actually having that discussed in language that ALL parties involved understand. THIS is often a LOT more tedious that the software support, at least for a lot of &quot;developers&quot;. Yet failing to do this leads them precisely into the proverbial ditch.

The author of this article does himself a poor service by exposing the limits of his knowledge and his unwillingness to learn from others.<p>Being a good coder is really nice, and you earn loads of cookie points with your team members and even some of your managers, I&#x27;m sure, but a valuable engineer (the kind who is trusted to make decisions about products) is one who understands how the scope of his activities affects the product perception for the clients and, ultimately, the bottom line for the company.<p>Want an example or two? Sure. 1) If 2% of your users represent ~20% of your revenue their concerns and requirements will be prioritized accordingly.<p>2) If you need to know a specific set of information that you don&#x27;t have access to at any time, ask for it. If such information is not available, raise that concern and work with your team and the product manager to make a judgment call.

I find both of these to be a little counter-productive. As it is, the tone of both of these posts just serves to alienate people from one another and to harden the lines in the sand by straight-up dropping anti-tank fortifications on them.<p>My answer to the original post would be this:<p>&quot;&quot; Some of the problems you are seeing sound fascinating and i have never ever seen them in any team i worked with. I would love to hear more about them. Some of the other problems you mentioned I have seen crop up, usually only when there has been a disconnect in communication between developers and managers.<p>This is an opportunity for both of us to learn some things, if we engaged in a dialogue on the matter.<p>You have chosen to post on two platforms where no useful manner of dialogue is offered, so it would need to happen elsewhere. If you&#x27;re up for it, what would your preferred platform be? &quot;&quot;

As a SW Engineer recently turned Project Manager, I find the original post of the &quot;Product Manager&quot; patronising, ignorant and offensive.<p>It seems to say &quot;Your job is not to code, your job is to code and in addition to do my own job as well&quot;.<p>Technical&#x2F;funcional requirements to satisfy, platforms supported, how to carry out changes made over the production environment, should be all decisions made by the product manager in agreement with sales, his boss, and of course the development team itself, to ensure that they are feasible.<p>If he has not the necessary technical knowledge or he cannot be bothered to take these decisions himself, he has no place as a product manager.

&gt; My job is to deliver robust solutions for the target users in the quickest time possible, and if that means dropping support for a barely used browser or something that’s not financially viable, then I will argue tooth and nail to drop it.<p>Eh. I am a SW engineer and guess I can&#x27;t be the only one to be happy whenever I don&#x27;t have to decide the cutoff point for web browsers.<p>I can be opinionated on this and other points yes, but I strongly disagree with the tone of the post.

Response to a post from a <i>product</i> manager is addressed to <i>project</i> manager O_o

I was very surprised to learn that &quot;focussed&quot; seems to be a correct spelling&#x2F;variation of &quot;focused&quot;.

Who else thought of this line in Fight Club?<p>“You are not your job, you&#x27;re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You&#x27;re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”