...and What If You Are Just a Small Planet at the Edge of the Milky Way

I recently had a conversation with my colleague about the importance of having a domain expert available in a project to clarify domain-specific questions.

In most cases, your work is more buggy and costly without access to such a person, I said.

But what if the product is not so important in the context of the whole company (a big insurance corporation, for example)? And it will be replaced by another project within two years. Yet it must be maintained and developed during this time to keep the business functioning in this area. Then the business is not so eager to dedicate a valuable domain expert for this case… And then the team is left wandering, looking for good domain answers, but this is included in the cost, my colleague replied.

You might be right, I responded.

(Of course, I could have attempted to convince him that people may become unmotivated or frustrated, but what difference does it make if the project is not that important for the business, and from a business perspective, there is no significant reason to become highly involved?)

It may sound sad, but frankly speaking, not everyone works on first-class projects, the shining stars in the sky, where everyone is excited just to think about them. In such cases, just do your work in a way that you can be proud of, with as much craftsmanship as possible, or consider changing your job.

(Text translated and moved from original old blog automatically by AI. May contain inaccuracies.)