[dyarosla]

Also, but rarely:

Some engineer wants it bad enough that they just build it -or some version of it- and then some executive gives the go-ahead to invest more into it.

At the end of the day, ideas are just ideas. Execution is everything.

[usehackernews]

As a PM, I factor this into prioritization. An engineer passionate for a product will lead to better engineering output, increased morale, and feeling of being heard. A motivated, bought-in engineer team is important when it comes to building the ‘high impact’ products.

Prioritization isn’t always black and white.

These qualitative factors matter and shouldn’t be ignored. As always, you weight it against other trade offs.

[tsunamifury]

I’ve been a pm Eng and designer and this sort of patronizing attitude sucks.

Look at the end of the day you should be cultivating fellow thought leaders because when you grow up you learn your priorities are more often than not just your own egotistical nonsense and wrong. But you have a lot of phrases to cut others down.

Try something different.

[3vidence]

I've learned the value of this.

Some people don't realize the value of something unless you show it to them. It's a risk for sure but honestly it keeps me sane vs trying to get 10 people aligned before starting something and then running out of time.

People will happily take credit for your work after it works.

[unkulunkulu]

yep, an engineer has the power to directly influence the code. This is a strong power. Sometimes just making a PR is enough and a good convincer in and of itself.

Use sparingly of course, weigh in time for making the argument, but this is an artifact just as a convincing research, text or a plot. code can be part of the argument.

[sfn42]

I once worked on an application that integrated with a third party api. The way it did this was with a large and horrible client library that used a separate db to cache the data.

The data was then fetched from the main application and used to rebuild the pages (in the main db) based on this data once a day.

The library had lots of problems, and one day it stopped working. I was tasked with fixing it - we had the source code, it was purchased from someone and copied into the repo. I spent most of the week if not more trying to figure out what was wrong, but I couldn't. What I did learn was that this library was some of the worst most pointless code I'd ever seen.

So I told the team that I think I can rebuild this thing from scratch faster than I can fix this bug. The intermediate db is pointless and most of the library code is dead, the rest is garbage. I can make a simple little thing that does exactly what we need better, faster and easier.

Nope. No bueno, fix what we have. So I spent a few hours over the weekend, less than a workday, building the new solution. Come Monday I had it pretty much working, a few things needed to be done but it already supported the use case. The pages were built correctly, they had the necessary content but some things were a bit messed up, nothing difficult to fix.

Showed it to the team, said I want to use this and delete the old stuff - nope.

The only half-decent explanation I got was that the client had paid a way too high amount of money for this garbage library and I guess the team lead didn't want to tell them we wanted to throw it out or something like that.

[darknavi]

I am very thankful that over the last few years I've built out the headroom on our team to chase "shiny" things that we know customers will want and that we (engineering) want but aren't exactly cookie cutter for our usual planning flow.

[tracerbulletx]

A lot of my biggest political successes as an engineer are just building something that I know is important and finding someone higher up who has always wanted it done but everyone tells them it's going to take multiple quarters and it never gets planned.

[kshacker]

Oh gosh, I did this yesterday.

We need to do something, my manager thinks it is too complex and we do not have the time, I have not been able to convince him (I am another manager), and yesterday I told my guy ... if it takes you X days, just do it and we will tell him later. He will find out after the coup and post-facto I can always justify it "oh we had so many other things going on, we never got to talk about this".

And my goal is to show that its value is more than the effort we spend with the workaround.