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It’s true. As I told someone recently: much of the job is going around to different engineers and asking “how can I personally make your job easier and more pleasant?” There’s a lot to enjoy about that.

And I mean that very literally. In my experience—I’m currently the most senior engineer in a developer experience org for a company of about 500 engineers, for whatever that’s worth—the best way to make great tools involves asking that question a lot.

The wrong way (which I’ve also done plenty of) is to ask a bunch of people about their problems, generalize them until they’re all a similar shape, and come up with a complex system that solves that general class of problem that everyone has in the abstract but no one has concretely.

And then you do it again. And again. And again. Eventually people will have similar-but-different problems and you’ll have to expand a tool‘s capabilities. Do that enough times and you’ll have a good shape for a tool that solves a class of problems in a way folks actually need.

An ancillary benefit is that you’ll also become known as a trustworthy person to bring issues to, which is very useful when you’re launching the updated version of that new not-so-simple-anymore tool.