> assuming the people you employ as "developers" weren't actually also doing the dev management and product management roles was wrong.
Also in the mix: Stuff involving B2B customers and integrating systems, where "developer" blurs a bit with sales-engineer or consultant, ex:
* Be on a call to ask significant questions (grounded in reading the code) to determine what the customer's real problem is.
* Help craft diplomatic but accurate explanations of what's going wrong.
* Explain what bugs or changes you can do for them versus which parts are fully on their end, sometimes with "here's what I think your engineers should consider doing" advice.
Not always fun, but sometimes enlightened self-interest means I'd rather spend an 1 hour being "one of our developers" in a customer-meeting, as opposed to 6 hours discovering everything is actually working as-intended and the customer just misunderstood what feature they were using.
Also in the mix: Stuff involving B2B customers and integrating systems, where "developer" blurs a bit with sales-engineer or consultant, ex:
* Be on a call to ask significant questions (grounded in reading the code) to determine what the customer's real problem is.
* Help craft diplomatic but accurate explanations of what's going wrong.
* Explain what bugs or changes you can do for them versus which parts are fully on their end, sometimes with "here's what I think your engineers should consider doing" advice.
Not always fun, but sometimes enlightened self-interest means I'd rather spend an 1 hour being "one of our developers" in a customer-meeting, as opposed to 6 hours discovering everything is actually working as-intended and the customer just misunderstood what feature they were using.