Not a false dichotomy. I agree with OP and I can say for certain that if you are one of the few developers that is "fond of meetings with customers" you are not the the type of person OP is talking about, and you are more rare than you think.
I am a former Dev turned PO/PM and now CEO, I can tell you many a developers are not fond of those meetings you are fond of and people like myself don't insert our selves where we don't belong, we simply join the meeting and have the vital conversation with the customers/stakeholders whos payments make payroll possible, while the developers refused to.
My team have always commented and liked that I "shielded" them from the none technical meetings and distilled customer needs in our kanban, without them having to go to the meeting.
While I agree this isn't the "best way" to do things, I simply have never seen a Dev Team work as the way HN tries to make the role sound "Dev/Eng and the customer is the only thing needed". Would love for this to be the case!
Also for those who think I'm down talking the abilities of my team, we made a company together when we left a huge company we worked for, as Co owners and even now we use same setup is used :)
> I simply have never seen a Dev Team work as the way HN tries to make the role sound "Dev/Eng and the customer is the only thing needed". Would love for this to be the case!
I think a lot of HN truly believes that Software Developer is the only important role at their company. Software goes straight from the developer's brain, through his fingertips into the computer, and then on to the online store (run by nobody) for customers to buy. Engineering managers, program managers, product managers, marketers, MBAs, tech writers, QA, lawyers, process people, various admins and liaisons... they all exist to play pointless political games, have distracting meetings, and obstruct the One True Role. Design docs, planning, schedules, e-mails, JIRA, reviews, syncs, exec updates... all are useless parts of a scheme to torture the developer. It should just be "developers developing, and then money comes in from somewhere." This is an exaggeration, but you see these themes all over the comment section.
> I think a lot of HN truly believes that Software Developer is the only important role at their company.
I doubt that. A lot of HN might have believed that some 10 years ago, perhaps, but most of those people have either matured or been driven away by the shift in the discourse.
I was one of the people who used to believe that, but the years of experience have taught me several important lessons that changed my mind. That change in attitude came both from my own failures and from having the rare privilege to work with people who were actually good at those other roles you listed.
> This is an exaggeration, but you see these themes all over the comment section.
And you'll keep seeing those comments, just like you'll keep seeing the comments about how developers are hypocritical divas. Those comments come from people's bad experiences.
Workplace political games are a thing. Unnecessary meetings and documents are a thing. Problematic, unprofessional developers are a thing.
Very small startups with only people selling the product or building the product can often deliver functionality much faster than corporations with all those other roles.
Truth. I'm that person and didn't appreciate how rare I was until I became an EM and learned that most of my team would actively avoid conversations with the customer. Even though I have no way to quantify it, I'm sure it's benefitted my career.
Are those people in contact with the customer able to make decisions regarding the roadmap or feature design? It’s a miserable position to be in front of unhappy customers while having no power to solve anything (which is why I tend to be polite with customer support).
100%, majority of the posts here are based in fantasy of how the world should work. They're also highlighting why most Devs cant deal with customers effectively. Customers aren't showing up with a clear spec and handing it off while middle managers butt in and ruin the whole thing.
Though I agree, most managers are BSing way too much, but the reality is that most Devs cannot navigate conversations like they think they can, and like you said, nor do they want to. And that is exactly what the managers do.
I live by these words: “if the client could enunciate a perfect spec, they would code it themselves”.
Software development is about helping people get what they want out of a computer. Not what they can specify, that’s asking way too much.
There's an in-between point that I think is better than either, but it can be more difficult to find the right balance: Direct contact with internal stakeholders (with the manager still somewhat involved to still have a good overall view and help prioritize / push back / act as a general buffer), while shielded from customers. That's the place I've always preferred.
I don't know how rare it is. I have always found it harder to write software when I don't know the people who will use it or get to see what they feel about it. It's part of the feedback loop.
When I get good feedback it's like winning a prize and when it's bad it lets me see where we should be spending our time rather than were we perhaps thought we should.
Comment about point 2:
As a CEO who recently tried to make personal Android and iOS Dev accounts for my hobby apps on my +20 year old Google and Apple accounts, let me just say that the processes are alot more complicated to apply than is pointed out here.
The key difference being that when I needed help I called Apple Support who transfered me once to their EU Developer support who, while I talked to him, setup and approved my Dev account.
While my Google account still is in pending limbo with their new verification system with no support to contact... I have since giving up getting access after multiple tries.
So Google changes do hit alot harder than the summery makes it seem.
Dane by choice (refugee).
Would just add as a counterweight to the negative views from people outside the country.
From a technical and user point of view, MitID have had less outages than Cloudflare, AWS and MS Azure in the last year. While I agree with the single point of failure, I also like that I setup my startup with all government and banking online via a login I had the last decade, painless and faster than most places without having to upload a single document in many a unsecured ways I heard from my US and Other European friends (outside the Nordic countries).
Yes we Danes trust our institutions more than others and trust is given by default and then lost, rather then "earned" (I would argue bought) in other places.
This is mostly a case of them not really reporting it, MitID is down quite frequently (now once a month ish, but in the first few years every week or so), or at least partially down . They now finally have their own status page, previously you had to get your status from a provider when they noticed that logins began to fail ;)
They're very light on reporting issues, in this case Signaturgruppen a subsidiary of NETS, didn't even mark this as a full outage.
As someone who was part of developing the “start your business”-registration system in DK, I’m pleased to hear that!
(It really is pretty complex, but a lot of effort went into making it both user friendly and reliable)
“Using debit puts you at a greater financial risk.”
What how? Surely the US populations credit card debt dorf even the global populations debit card fraud numbers. So while my whole family in a combined 200 years of adulthood have indeed lost some 1000 euro total in fraud, it's not thing compared to the average Americans credit card bills.
I'd rather risk the street criminals with my debit than the suit wearing ones with their credit.
My debit card is a direct line to my primary bank account. If something goes wrong there and an attacker gains access, my cash is simply gone. Yes, the bank will perform an investigation and yes they may issue some provisional credits as a bridge, but there's a window of time between the theft and that investigation concluding where my actual cash is not in my account.
With a credit card, if the card is compromised, its not my money being stolen - its the card issuer's money from my line of credit, and they were planning on settling up with me when my monthly statement closes. I still have to launch a fraud case with the issuer, but critically, _all of my money is still in my bank account_ and I can continue to pay my other bills and obligations as normal.
I think its reasonable to consider giving up that buffer to be additional risk for the debit card approach, setting aside any other advantages or disadvantages between the two.
My debit card is a direct line to my primary bank account. If something goes wrong there and an attacker gains access, my cash is simply gone.
Your bank lacks proper security protections then. Here most banks have limits on debit card transactions. If you want to do a very large transaction, you have to increase the limit for a short time period in your banking app, and there is a delay of a few hours (they'll warn you when the spending limit is increased).
IANAL, but also consumer protection is much stronger in Europe. E.g. in NL if you stick to 5 basic rules, which are sensible things like not intentionally giving away your banking card or PIN code, the bank has to refund stolen money:
EU has much stronger consumer protection and it's on the banks to provide secure systems. Like if my card gets skimmed by an ATM or merchant the bank pays for the fraudulent charges. And overall the EU has much less card fraud.
That's interesting!
However I would argue Jobs sadly won that argument, as there really didn't come any open source os for neither phones or major push on PCs in the almost 30 years since that exchange.
While yes some software have come in that format, it took the big 3 to push the server Linux based clouds, Google to push it on phone, tablets and laptops and now Steam to make a push for the average gamer.
This is not to discredit the work being done outside those lab's which very much build on the work for free or by foundations, however the first versions just don't capture a majority of the available markets which the OSes Jobs mention very much did and the others by the billion dollar labs since.
No one is calling for war, but it's not like that documented history happened in this century. Greenland had been part of Denmark since the vikings. Surely we can get past the history and talk in today's terms. The people of Greenland have a voice in Danish politics and both the people and politicians said NO to wanting to have US rule them and YES to stay with Denmark.
So yes, defending Greenland becomes a case of helping a people stay free and not invaded, no matter the enemy.
It's silly to say "well we have no chance against" because then you can end that with China, Russia or even India.
Heh.. I remember when they announced this thing like 6 months ago. It was fully white and people mocked it a lot for resembling a drop of male bodily fluids.
Now it seems they fixed it in the most lazy way (changing the color) but managed to give it an awful name. "Mico" is a group of various monkey species.
As a dane, this is horrible, and a racist colonial thing that needs to be gotten rid of.
However the US is on a systematic mission to tear up Greenland in a attempt to aquire it, even as the people there voted to stay with Denmark.
Remember the US president actually threaten a small EU and NATO country to give him their land?
For this none technews to hit HN seems like a further attempt of that propaganda campaign.
It’s not hard tech, but certainly the use of intelligence “tests,” rorschach blots, etc. fits in line with many other stories shared on HN. Especially these tests being used to separate children in the year 2025 not 1925.
It’s also a popular article trending on multiple aggregators, I read it elsewhere this morning.
It is possible that this is a campaign. But this eugenics program needs to stop. The fact that this is not a scandal in Denmark in 2025 is very telling of the Danish society imo especially in the context of their immigration and their chat control policies.
You seen to have failed to understand both solutions and changes you mention...
the technology stack of our digital post and the change of letter delivery (I don't blame you, many of my fellow Danes don't understand it either).
But Eboks is not holding all digital post of all our citizens, it's one of at least 3 services who we can choose from to read our mail from the governmental organizations.
It's a freemarket compromise with multiple private and public solutions the public can choose from.
Also while yes the private company that did deliver physical mail no longer will, another have taken its place for physical letter... Isn't that freemarket capitalism? Why should one private entity have the contract for all time?
Your post does read like the old "Denmark is a specialist hellhole" posts from the conservatives when Bernie Sanders dared using the country as an example of doing Social Wellfare + Free market right.
Yeah, the only dumb thing about the digital mail is that they're not just using email with an official registry.
They could have started some kind of certification thing for email providers and even funded a couple of certified email providers much more effectively than the digital post monstrosity.
That would have been awesome and forward looking, and perhaps even helped ordinary people get better security for their personal emails.
I don't think a massive market concentration in a single cloud service is good for societal preparedness, regardless of whether there are technically other options.
In the same way, it concerns me how much Sweden relies on BankID, but that's a different thing.
And when Muricans wonder why the rest of the world laughs at your simplestic greed based view of "winning", this comment is a perfect example of why.
What a weird way to try and connect inter continental economics and private company valuation as a sole metric for success or achievement with test taking at a university level in Germany...
It's weird to correlate how the idiosyncracies of a deeply-rooted developmental system might affect the sensibilities or perspectives of the adults that said systems develop?
I am a former Dev turned PO/PM and now CEO, I can tell you many a developers are not fond of those meetings you are fond of and people like myself don't insert our selves where we don't belong, we simply join the meeting and have the vital conversation with the customers/stakeholders whos payments make payroll possible, while the developers refused to.
My team have always commented and liked that I "shielded" them from the none technical meetings and distilled customer needs in our kanban, without them having to go to the meeting. While I agree this isn't the "best way" to do things, I simply have never seen a Dev Team work as the way HN tries to make the role sound "Dev/Eng and the customer is the only thing needed". Would love for this to be the case!
Also for those who think I'm down talking the abilities of my team, we made a company together when we left a huge company we worked for, as Co owners and even now we use same setup is used :)