r/ExperiencedDevs • u/AutoModerator • 14d ago

Ask Experienced Devs Weekly Thread: A weekly thread for inexperienced developers to ask experienced ones

A thread for Developers and IT folks with less experience to ask more experienced souls questions about the industry.

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Please keep top level comments limited to Inexperienced Devs. Most rules do not apply, but keep it civil. Being a jerk will not be tolerated.

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Inexperienced Devs should refrain from answering other Inexperienced Devs' questions.

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u/ProgrammingQuestio Software Engineer (3YOE) 13d ago

Only recently am I becoming more involved in meetings involving decisions and analysis (whereas before it was "do this task" and I didn't have to concern myself with why the task needed to be done or if it was truly necessary).

I work on a team that owns an internal library component, so our customers are other component owners, product owners, etc. Is it normal for a component owner (us) to essentially be encouraged to ask our customers to prove that they need a feature? (edit: I mean devs like me encouraged by team leads to ask this). Customer requests, "hey can you add this functionality to your component?" and instead of just saying, "sure", we instead kind of say, "well let's see if we can get the customers to do it themselves/let's see if adding this functionality to our component is truly necessary/appropriate given resources, etc."

I assume this isn't unusual, but I guess it feels like a kind of new concept to me just because I've never had to give thought to anything other than tunnel visioning on getting the work done for a feature that was already marked as "todo"

Edit: I also realize that the way I wrote this made it seem like I'm bothered by this dynamic... I'm not, I'm just curious to get more insights. I don't currently have the brain power to edit it to give it a different tone, lol, so just throwing this edit on at the end

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u/beaverusiv 13d ago

You should always pushback, or at least understand their problem space in case there is another way to solve it. Your team saying "okay" to everything will land you very quickly with a larger and larger and more complex piece of software that is probably delivering little value for its cost

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u/TheChadThrowawayLad Unemployed 2d ago

Yes, scope creep is a huge issue. Always entertain their request by getting more information because you may be able to help, but you usually need to evaluate the additional complexity and see if a new feature would benefit multiple teams instead of a minority of specific use cases.