For the techie folks out there:
Reading an article regarding Amazon’s success implementing a distributed micro-services architecture and I came across this success factor bullet.
“Developers should spend some time with customer service every two years. Their they’ll actually listen to customer service calls, answer customer service e-mails, and really understand the impact of the kinds of things they do as technologists.”
Having spent over a decade with organizations that do and do not expose their engineering teams to customers directly, I can state with some authority that this the above is indeed a critical success factor.
I recall an experience with a large organization that absolutely forbid engineers to have anything to do with “Production” (aka the real world) in an effort to increase security. In the end it ended up lowering moral across the board and demonstrably lowering both productivity and quality with no actual security benefit.
