Being a lead developer, I don't know if I am on the side of developers or managers.
In a product roadmap meet today, one of the developers explained the update of last week. He talked for at least 15 mins.
After that the sales lead looked at me, expecting me to explain (or basically dumb it down for her)
Me: Oh, he meant "UI improvements"
She: Oh, why didn't he say so?

I don't know who was the reason for the FacePalm 😐

I'm a BI consultant and I was tasked as a reporting and ETL lead for our project. Now my company wants me to take on the role of reporting manager, which is an odd switch to turn on suddenly....no dev, just manage. I go from empathizing with other reporting developers to cracking a whip overnight...

@mantekillah I can understand 🙁

Your colleague should be able to describe his work in a way so that she could understand him. If he talks for 15 minutes and she didn't get what he said, he effectively wasted time.

Also why this muggles tag? Are we still fantasizing about being superior to the evil evil non technical people? It makes me cringe my fucking eyes out.

@Makenshi Yes, I agree about the developer to explain properly, but most people can't dumb down the jargons. He's a very senior programmer with a talent for creating wonders though, but clearly lack that explanation skill.

On the other hand, what is the point of having him in the meeting everytime when I am the one who needs to do the explaining.

So my rant is for both of them. The developer should have used less jargons and have used the simple wordings. The non-programmers should have been better at understanding technical terms, because they are going to sell the product which is highly technical in nature and they do affect the product design and how are we going to move forward. ( they all have technical degrees and are supposed to understand our work)

I am stuck in between. 😐

Relatable, when you're mostly being a backend developer.

I find instead of trying to dumb it down, aiming to draw out the essence of what it does to be a better approach..

For instance, instead of explaining the details of how I improved X, simply saying something like "I updated X for better overall performance."

If asked for depth then "{something visual} should now be smoother as a result."

I call it "developeritus"

Was in a meet years ago, we were building a publishing platform for a magazine company.

A guy asks "can we print PDFs?"

A fellow dev then spent literally 5 or 6 minutes talking about how that all worked. When he finished I said to the guy who originally asked the question:

What my colleague meant to say, was "yes".

From that point on I was known as the human developer and I'm now a PO.