How many of you have ever commented on a manager’s lack of technical ability and/or knowledge? I’d wager that most of us have been astonished at least once in our careers by the technical incompetence of someone in charge of a technical project. A manager who doesn’t understand what “compile” means, who can’t grasp the concept of “automated testing”. Someone who doesn’t understand the domain of their employees.
It is difficult to work for someone like that. It can be difficult trusting their judgment when you know that they can’t grasp the simplest functions of your day-to-day job. Now, before you think this is another internet rant about clueless managers, let me ask you a question:
Can you have a conversation with your customers in their domain?
If you write financial software, can you sit down and talk with the financial analysts who use their software, without requiring the use of a “domain expert” to translate for you? If you can’t, you should consider learning how.
Too often we focus on learning our domain. We learn all the neat tricks in our chosen language. We become experts in the quirks of automated memory management. We learn about the differences between allocating on the stack versus on the heap.
Honestly though, when was the last time a successful release hinged on some arcane development trick that only 10 people in the world know about?
Every software release hinges on the ability of that software to solve some pressing need of its customers. And unless you are selling software and services to other software developers, those customers do not care about the software development domain. They care about the financial services domain. They care about the medical domain. They care about the cellular phone domain.
Become a domain expert. Learn to talk to your customers so you can anticipate their needs before they do. Don’t be content to be just an expert developer, strive to be more, so that the next time a customer calls you, you don’t become that clueless manager, asking what exactly it means to compile your software.