I’m a business analyst, and a big part of my job involves working with engineers and product managers to gather detailed, in-depth information. For reasons I don’t fully understand (though I have my theories), I often find that engineers, in particular, seem oddly reluctant to share the information I need. This makes the process more challenging than I’d like. Does anyone have tips or tricks for building trust with engineers to encourage them to share information more willingly and quickly?
EDIT: Here’s a summary with more details for those who requested more info: I’m working on optimizing processes related to our in-house file ingestion system, which we’ve been piecing together over time to handle tasks it wasn’t originally designed for. The system works well enough now, but it’s still very much a MacGyver setup—duct tape and dental floss holding things together. We got through crunch time with it, but now the goal is to refine and smooth everything out into a process that’s efficient, clear, and easy for everyone to follow.
Part of this involves getting all the disparate systems and communication silos talking to each other in a unified way—JIRA is going to be the hub for that. My job is to make sure that the entire pipeline—from ticket creation, to file ingestion, to processing and output—is documented thoroughly (but not pedantically) and that all teams involved understand what’s required of them and why.
Where I’m running into challenges is in gathering the nitty-gritty technical details from engineers. I need to understand how their processes work today, how they’ve solved past issues, and what they think would make things better in an ideal world. But I think there’s some hesitation because they’re worried about “incriminating” themselves or having mistakes come back to haunt them.
I’ve tried to make it clear that I’m not interested in punishing anyone for past decisions or mistakes—on the contrary, I want to learn from them to create a better process moving forward. My goal is to collaborate and make their jobs easier, not harder, but I think building trust and comfort will take more time.
If anyone has strategies for improving communication with engineers—especially around getting them to open up about technical details without fear—I am all ears.
Be interested when they talk about things and ask questions. Engineers stereotypically have been told too many times that they need to dumb things down. And there’s a large percentage of neurodivergent people in software engineering who like to info-dump, but have been told their whole lives that they were boring or they overshare. But often when they are given the opportunity to share openly or even better, people show interest in learning, they usually will open up. It might take time, and it might take you getting a basic understanding of some technical topics so they don’t have to explain those basics to you to even start explaining their work.
I have worked as an analyst, product manager, project manager, engineer, and architect. So I tend to be really good at bringing business and technical people together by interjecting a few details that an engineer might skim over because it’s basic to them as well as interjecting business scenarios that a business person might consider obvious, but an engineer might get frustrates because it was never explained to them and they like to know “why”.
I think you and I might have some things in common. I am also captain of team Neurodivergent, and we are my favorite kinds of people.
This is excellent advice! I want to underscore that Engineers are very often much driven by the how’s and the why’s of things. I’ll admit to judging people based on how they answer those sorts of questions. From a project perspective, I’m far less interested in doing something if the why of it can’t be adequately explained to me. Similarly, I’m far more willing to take a “you know, I’m not actually sure”, than a “we do it this way, because that’s the way we’ve always done it” (the latter is probably the fastest way to tank any respect I might have had).
I’m a software developer, and I sometimes if I’m asked how something works, I can find it difficult to explain things in a way that would make sense to the listener, whether they are a PM or the client.
Other times, depending on the question, I simply don’t know the answer, and it could take hours for me to gain enough understanding of the project to even respond intelligently.
I’m a developer too and sometimes I say “I don’t know” knowing full well the shitstorm it’ll bring. I’m a few years in and I just don’t give a fuck if that pisses off the person on the other end.
I just don’t have time for games — a few times I tried to give a better answer but didn’t have all the information I needed and every time it came back to bite me in the ass.
I love being a developer with all my heart, I don’t come into the office and I love my job. But I won’t play politics, kiss ass or put lipstick on a pig. Why would I? In my experience doing so is a lot worse than admitting I don’t know something; if someone wants to throw a tantrum that’s fine but they can do it on their time. If we could just get off this time suck call I can find the information I need pretty quick and get you an answer ASAP.
Oh man, there’s been a few times over my career where they asked me what seemed like an easy enough question to them, but it’s in some terrible legacy code that were never given any time to fix, that fixing itself would be a huge ordeal and I respond with something like, it’ll take a day or two to get a confident answer to that.
They usually say no thanks after that, but they have sent me down that rabbit hole before.
Reminds me of my previous job that I stupidly took on because they wanted to go from the developer’s custom fork of Rails 3.8 up to Rails 6 (just released at the time).
The entire thing was spaghetti code and it was so out of date that I couldn’t really do incremental versions updates due to libraries just straight up missing or being unmaintained.
My other mistake was thinking that because I had years of Rails experience I could take this on. As expected bugs occurred and everyone pointed their finger at me. I could barely make out what was going on and wasn’t familiar with unit specs at the time (ouch) so it was a poor experience on my end.
(My favorite was them doing currency conversions but storing the results as floats in the database. During a monthly scheduled job thousands of transactions were 1¢ off due to poor rounding. I felt ashamed because before working there I always knew to never do this, but apparently I didn’t do an adequate job of confirming how it worked in this app.)
thousands of transactions were 1¢ off due to poor rounding
Maybe the code was so poorly done on purpose so that developer could steal those pennies. You took his place, and now he’s off in the tropics living the dream!
Talk less, listen more.
They’re probably (no offense) nerds, so let them nerd out and listen to them.
Then actually act on what they say, and soon they’re be telling you more shit than you want to know.
Accept “I have no idea” as an answer, and don’t use it as an opportunity to push things in the direction you want.
learn to account for people being wrong, and don’t punish them for it.Engineers want to be accurate. They don’t want to give answers that they’re unsure about or just speculating.
Early in their careers they’re often willing to, but that gets beaten out of them pretty quickly by people with deadlines. Expressing uncertainty often means the person interprets the answer in the direction they want, and then holds the engineer to that answer.
“It could be anywhere from 2-8 months I think, but we won’t know until we’re further into the design phase” is taken as 2 months, planned around, and then crunch Time starts when it starts to go over. Or revising an estimate once new information or changing requirements are revealed is treated as incompetence, even though more work taking more time is expected.It’s in the self interest of the engineer to be cagey. “I don’t like to give estimates this early” is much harder to turn into a solid commitment than an earnest best estimate given the current known state of the project.
Similar for resources required or processes. Anything you don’t say is unlikely to be held against you.
This is brilliant. I often suspected they did not want to “incriminate” themselves, and I have tried assuring them that that is in no way what I am about. I am looking to optimize processes, and I am very eager for their ideas on what would work better than what we’ve been doing.
Verbal assurances mean little to many. At least put it in an email. Otherwise CYA dominates.
And remember the docco kicks around forever. Indemnification until retirement is impossible to ensure.
And, as our RedHat TAM rediscovers, we can bring that shit out of the archive to prove a point … or to heckle about overblown systemd promises, but that’s PTSD for another venue.
I’m an engineer for past 20 years ,and the moment I get a whiff of some biz person fluffing bullshit I check out. Not saying you’re like that but something to be mindful of
So be real, honest, straightforward, put in effort into understanding the technicals so youre not just a sales annoyance or engineers will write you off right away IMO
Also I don’t think some people realize how busy or hard engineering can be. I’ve been working my ass off on a ground up new product and a lot of stuff just falls to the wayside out of lack of time
There’s also [email protected] [email protected] among others
That last paragraph hits home, but in a sad way for me. I spent most of the last year working on a new project to streamline one of the biggest time sinks we have, and as we’re coming up on having an MVP ready to start beta testing, my org just dumped the entire team other than 1 guy. So I lost the guy who was my peer/dba on the project, and the dude who knows how to run the driver software.
Going to try to see if we can salvage what we made since it’s still needed, but fuck that wrecks a ton of time and effort. And really sucks cuz my team had to pick up the slack while I was trying to get this working, and we don’t even have anything to show for it…
Thank you!!! In fact I have been emphasizing that I need to know the technicals, and that they should not worry about getting too detailed, because I need a very thorough understanding so I can best come up with a process for how they do file ingestion (which mostly is up to them) but then also how the information gets to them, and how they output the data, in the best, most thoroughly documented (without being uselessly pedantic) way possible. Which is pretty much going to be getting everything into JIRA, and eliminating all the uselessly disparate systems that people are trying to stitch together currently. I need to make sure all the teams along the road of this process are communicating with each other, and at are at least having a basic understanding of the whys behind what is required of the process. And of course that it is efficient and fast and definitely not cumbersome.
there’s a few things here that trigger red flags for me:
not worry about getting too detailed
oh good! because it’s probably ill-defined and nobody really knows and figuring that out involves a lot of reading other people’s shit code and we have work to do
because I need a very thorough understanding
oh you mean do worry - you want to know exactly how it works… sorry bud, no time, that’s a lot of energy
thoroughly documented
ugghghh documentation is for people that don’t understand that documentation is out of date the second you write it: don’t drag me into your futile attempt to make a static artifact that i’ll need to maintain in the future when i update a living system
eliminating all the uselessly disparate systems that people are trying to stitch together currently
okay but that’s really dismissive… this is work that people have put in - even if it’s shit and everyone knows it’s shit, it’s disheartening to have things thrown out… and what they do now they know how it works, they know the caveats… you’re talking about coming in, getting a cursory understanding (what you think you can understand everyone’s problem when the people that built the thing don’t have the full picture?) and then planning out and telling them what to do
if you want help from engineers, ask them for help to build a new thing: don’t ask them for help to explain something so you can tell them what to build. we’re creative, and we love solving problems and we hate robotically implementing someone else’s vision
Have you stopped to consider that the current solution might be better than an all JIRA one? I can definitely see a lot of “file ingestion” pipelines that would be much better handled by a bunch of different systems intertwined than JIRA, especially for automated file ingestion (which I guess is what you’re doing? Hard to know but hard for it to be something else).
I don’t know what’s the situation there, but if I was an engineer on one such project I would explain to the person why it’s not feasible, but it could be that that got interpreted as not explaining stuff. An easy to understand example would be someone asking what’s the best way to replace a car (that has been cobbled to pieces from separate cars) with a shoe, and then you try to explain to the person that that just doesn’t make sense they say that you’re being uncooperative and not explaining how the car works so you can make the shoe do the same.
Look, I’m not saying this is your case, but it feels like you’re approaching this the wrong way, you have a new solution without even understanding the current one. A better approach would be to gather the engineers and ask them what are THEIR problems with the system, and how would THEY like to fix them. If the Jira thing comes from higher ups tell them that this is a new requirement, but let THEM solve the technical issues, you are unlikely to be able to even if they explain them to you in detail.
Ok, so I AM asking the engineers that. But we need to be angle to track the implementations for each client, and that is why we are using JIRA. I’m very open to alternative ideas, but one of the problems is that teams involved are using salesforce, JIRA, and Atlassian, and this is causing a serious dearth of communication, as well as there being no way for anyone to get a bird’s eye view of where implementations currently stand. Frankly I have a lot more autonomy and control over this thing than anyone in this thread seems to be used to, so if people have better process ideas, I am all ears.
Ok, so it seems that you’re only talking about managerial stuff, whether to use Jira or Atlassian, engineers don’t usually care about that, and there’s usually no technical reason to use one or the other, so it could be that you’re asking them to explain how a car works to try to figure out the best shoe to wear.
Also no one that’s not involved in the project will have better process ideas because we don’t know the process, and apparently neither do you from what you’re saying, it’s the thing the engineers “refuse” to explain to you. I think at the end of the day you need to sit down and explain what the higher ups want and listen to their ideas on how to get there.
explain what the higher ups want and listen to their ideas on how to get there
absolutely this… engineers want to help you design solutions… if you come to me and ask me to explain something so that you can design a solution that i’m then told to build you’re removing all the fun out of it and i ain’t gonna help with that
JIRA, and Atlassian
Since one makes the other, it’s like saying “Rav4 and Toyota”. I’m assuming you mean Confluence (aka Flatulence; or Confluenza for the stress-based sickness from watching the spinning please-wait-web-loading symbol too much).
using salesforce, JIRA, and [Confluence]
Quit it.
No one uses those tools; they get used by the tools. They’re slow, cloud-based, usually under-budgeted for the great gobby java blob-wrangling clown shows they are.
If you’re asking deadline-driven engineers to use a slow cloud app like that, with their caffeine levels, and invite real feedback without fear of penalty, you’re going to get some interesting opinions. Please, try to find something more usable for the non-deadline-helping work-tangents like documentation; which are important, but not on-fire-important like every other bloody thing on the list.
In addition to what other people have said, “the technicals” and “getting too detailed” is ridiculously vague. There is always a too detailed. Software engineering is a giant world and engineers specialize, and even other engineers with a slightly different specialty don’t really want to know all your “technicals”.
Be specific about what details you’re interested in and why if you want to build trust. Demonstrate tangible investment in figuring out what your gaps are and ask specific questions, and be clear about what kind of answers you want. “Thorough understanding” is not helpful.
There is always a too detailed. Software engineering is a giant world and engineers specialize, and even other engineers with a slightly different specialty don’t really want to know all your “technicals”.
100%. I regularly have to tell DB or App people that I only need the high level answer because the details are immaterial to the discussion at hand. I might be personally interested, but I got shit to do…
A million times this.
This post is a little too vague to give real advice. You don’t tell us what industry you’re in. You don’t tell us if the engineers are the end users of the software or processes you’re working on, or if they will implement the software or processes you’re working on.
If they’re the end users, they might be concerned that the changes you’re designing are going to make their jobs harder. A lot of changes in the past couple decades aimed at “efficiency” have involved making people take on more work for no additional pay, then firing the administrative staff or other engineers who used to do that work. Even if that isn’t the sort of project you’re working on they are reasonably wary based on past experience. Or maybe it’s not clear to you how this will make their life harder but management will find a way.
If the engineers are writing the software that you are helping design, how are you helping to make their jobs easier and more fulfilling? It’s an unfortunate fact that software engineers are sometimes treated like misbehaving vending machines that will produce software if you force them to. If they are writing the code, there’s a very good chance that they know more about this process than anyone else in the room, but are they treated like they know more than anyone else in the room? Is their expertise valued or are they treated like roadblocks when they give their expert opinions?
This is extremely insightful. Thank you. To keep it somewhat vague, I am trying to optimize processes surrounding file ingestion. And I am trying to eliminate all the roadblocks caused by siloing of information. We have an in house file ingestion “engine” if you will, and we have really been rebuilding it from the ground up because its original function was not what we are using it for. So there are problems. To date, we have be MacGyvering the fuck out of everything with a pen knife and some dental floss, but we got through crunch time, and now we need it to be smooth, and by the numbers. Easy and clear for everyone.
Well that might explain some things.
Not to throw shade at your company but that process is so backwards that it’s no wonder the engineers are sparse on the details. I saw another comment likening software development to a crossword puzzle, which is a pretty good analogy. To further it, changing software once it’s done is like trying to swap out a clue/ word once the rest of the puzzle is built. It’s theoretically possible, but depending on how the puzzle is designed, it can range from an absurd amount of work to nearly impossible. Given the way you’ve described the state of things, your engineers are probably low on goodwill to boot.
I’ve worked on cobbled-together crunch-time hell-projects and the last thing I’d want after getting free would be a random BA coming to me about details that more than likely packed with the project PTSD and would very much like to forget. Doubly so if it’s issues that I bought up early in the design/ development process (when they would have been comparatively easy to fix) and was dismissed by the powers that be. I can only speak for myself, but I can only take so much “that’s not a priority”, “we don’t have time for that”/ “we’ll see if that becomes a problem in the future and deal with it then” before I throw in the towel, stop keeping track of everything that’s wrong, and just bin the entire project as dumper fire run by people who would rather check boxes than make things better.
Was trying to compose a similar statement on that lack of details. Like, my background is scum/ agile software development and if a random BA called me up out of the blue for project details, my first response is going to be “I’m busy, talk to my scrum master and/or manager” and failing that it’s likely going to be the minimum amount of information required to get said BA to leave me alone so that I can get back to work. Plus, unless I know that my audience has the technical capacity for low level details, I tend to leave them out (I don’t mind answering questions, but I also don’t have time in my life to spout information that’s going to go in one ear and out the other).
My husband is an engineer. Screaming, “what the fuck are talking about?” is probably not the way.
Have you asked them why they are reluctant to turn over the deets?
I’ve certainly withheld info because explaining DMARC is a lot more time consuming then just saying it’s a special type of spam filter.
Actually, no. Not in so many words. It seems so simple. My theory was that they are afraid of admitting mistakes because they think I’m going to “report” them or something, and make them look bad. And I have opened at least 3 times with how I am not remotely interested in anything like that, and I am looking to document process, and get their ideas for what an ideal process would look like for them. I feel like they don’t believe me.
Again, verbal assurances mean nothing, especially if they know the issue has internal political implications as this one obviously does. And even if they believe you, that doesn’t mean they trust your boss, so anything they say could still burn them later. Words alone can’t resolve this dilemma.
Also, has anyone tried what you’re trying before? If so, maybe you’re struggling because of past failure, not your fault but still your problem now.
This is an area my company has historically sucked at. Hard. I aim to fix that, and in fact that is the reason my team was created.
The deeper I get into a subject involving engineering, the less I can relate what I know effectively. If I’ve done the thing many times, I can talk about it more freely.
It boils down to, “I don’t know what I don’t know.” The only thing I can do is explain the long path of stuff I’ve figured out in order to get where I am at in my understanding. I don’t have a clear overview scope. I’m aware I have likely made mistakes even within what I know.
If you are asking me for official statements that can come back to me, I’m going to be extremely cautious in what I tell you and only speak about things I am absolutely sure of and have triple checked. Most of what I’m sure of is going to be unhelpful surface level information. Professionally, telling you anything that could be wrong is career suicide. Reputation is the currency of an engineering career.
This is exactly the vibe I have been getting. And I have really been trying to reassure them that I am in no way looking to “punish” anyone for any mistakes. If anything, I want to hear about mistakes, and any solutions that were thought up, as a guide to how we can improve the process going forward, to make their jobs easier, as well as everyone’s. It’s all super positive, and none of this will ever “come back to bite them.” But without finding out their challenges, it makes it very difficult to try an anticipate what issues we may run into as we build these processes, and further on down the line.
Try to also explain how you currently understand the systems and processes, and ask them to correct what believe need to be corrected, or why not ask them who else might know better
I’m not an engineer, but I work in IT and work with engineers, analysts, and management. I have no idea what your knowledge or background is, but the engineers may be reluctant to get too technical in fear of talking over your head. I would make clear to them that you need specific, technical details and not to worry about to much jargon. If they’re reluctant for other reasons, it may be an issue for your management to address.
This is definitely part of it, and I am starting to make headway assuring at least this first team, that I am very eager for the nitty gritty technical details. This stuff all makes sense to me conceptually, I just never wanted to learn to code (and I am actively rethinking that decision), so there’s very little of it I will not be able to grasp.
As an engineer with almost thirty years of experience, I don’t want to be on the hook for telling someone the wrong thing. Also, if you want an estimate there are lots of engineers who won’t want to give an estimate of 2 months when you’re expecting 2 days. Then we have to explain that the entire app is a fucking unmaintainable shit show because we’ve been doing two months worth of work in two days by cutting corners and writing shit code and we know it.
Also they could just be shy introverts. But it’s probably a reluctance to commit themselves.
I say all this like a universal truth, but just by reading all the responses here you can tell it varies from person to person. You have to assess your team and figure out each individual. My experience is it’s a trust/comfort thing, but that may not be your case.
I think a lot of it is trust/comfort, and I am definitely making progress in that regard, and the advice here has been fantastic. Which I suspected it would be. My strategy is that we need to work together to solve issues, like if they were to “tell me the wrong thing.” It could certainly gum up the works if I am basing a part of a new process on bad info, but honestly I have no desire to gotcha anyone, and I think that would be completely unproductive at this stage of the game. They have this file ingestion “engine” running pretty darn well, and now we need to tweak, and improve, and gameplan for the upcoming year.
please give an example interaction that was difficult?
Had a similar experience at a job. One source of resistance I found was engineers knowing upper management had absolutely no stomach for the type of change that the company desperately needed. This would lead to them likely not implementing anything meaningful. So rather than waste their time helping me and getting on board with the changes, they just kept churning out the same trash and questioned why I hadn’t made all their lives better.
Everyone wants change so long as they don’t have to be the ones to change.
You’re spot on. Fortunately the board has seen the light, and made some big changes today, which sound like they are going to flow downhill.
As an engineer, I hate having to repeat the same thing again and again so take notes and make sure you understand them.
Secondly know the product or project intimately relative to your level. For example if I work on the project and I know it from the code and infrastructure and everything else in addition to how it works for the end user then the least I expect is that the person asking the questions has used the software with a demo account on UAT or something so that my answers will not to over their heads. Knowing the product will also allow you to talk to clients better and you will know what it can and can’t do.
I’m ok with someone if I see they are willing to make the effort regardless of their level, if someone is coming to me to do their work for them , then I lose my patience fast and will very soon be less helpful and prioritize my actual work over their bs.
Finally as I said we are often overworked and not looking to have more things to do. We are the ones that have to stay late to fix someone’s mess or get called to patch an emergency zero day in some software used by the company on a weekend. In addition we support everyone else as without us there is no product and no jobs for the rest of you. We are at the bottom of the pyramid holding the rest up with the CEO being the prick at the top.
Finally dont just engage when you need something, get to know them and see if you can help them with something. Maybe a heads up about a project or client to avoid or some thing.
It is good that you want to bridge the gap and I wish more in your position would do so.
The engineers have their own tasks and deadlines to deal with, why are you talking to them directly to get the information you want? You need to talk to their project manager to either give you access to the database in question, write a tool that generates the report you need or write a one time query to get this information. All of these things take time and need to be planned and resourced. I hope you’re not just walking up to people and asking for random lists of customers that ordered more than once in the last year or whatever?
This is not at all what is happening here, but your sentiments are certainly valid. This is about process creation and improvement.
You should probably add some specifics, because your original post is super vague.
