Developers are - on average - terrible at this. If they weren't, TPMs, Product Managers, CTOs, none of them would need to exist.

It's not specific to software, it's the entire World of business. Most knowledge work is translation from one domain/perspective to another. Not even knowledge work, actually. I've been reading some works by Adler[0] recently, and he makes a strong case for "meaning" only having a sense to humans, and actually each human each having a completely different and isolated "meaning" to even the simplest of things like a piece of stone. If there is difference and nuance to be found when it comes to a rock, what hope have we got when it comes to deep philosophy or the design of complex machines and software?

LLMs are not very good at this right now, but if they became a lot better at, they would a) become more useful and b) the work done to get them there would tell us a lot about human communication.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Adler

> Developers are - on average - terrible at this. If they weren't, TPMs, Product Managers, CTOs, none of them would need to exist.

This is not really true, in fact products become worse the farther away from the problem a developer is kept.

Best products I worked with and on (early in my career, before getting digested by big tech) had developers working closely with the users of the software. The worst were things like banking software for branches, where developers were kept as far as possible from the actual domain (and decision making) and driven with endless sterile spec documents.

I think developers are usually terrible at it only because they are way too isolated from the user.

If they had the chance to take the time to have a good talk with the actual users it would be different.

I disagree, I feel (experienced) developers are excellent at this.

It's always about translating between our own domain and the customer's, and every other new project there's a new domain to get up to speed with in enough detail to understand what to build. What other professions do that?

That's why I'm somewhat scared of AIs - they know like 80% of the domain knowledge in any domain.