To be the devil's advocate, engineers themselves can be hilariously incompetent too. Engineers have a tendency of assuming that budget is infinite and target audience is other engineers from same specialization. Open-source projects often have this problem where you can have dozens of thousands of man-hours poured into a project without a single end-user opinion taken into account. At some point my manager, who himself used to be an engineer, told me with straight face to convince the rest of the engineering department to drop everything and join his newest pet project despite zero potential of any business outcomes.

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thwarted a day ago | parent [-]

> Open-source projects often have this problem where you can have dozens of thousands of man-hours poured into a project without a single end-user opinion taken into account.

How is this "a problem"? The reason there are dozens of thousands of hours on an open source project is because the end-users are working on it. Some projects exist solely for someone to work on it (that is, the "working on it" is the "use case"). Open source does not expect or need to make money or get "users", so how people discover or source what they build and how to proceed isn't really a "problem".

	▲	pixl97 18 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Any open source project that becomes any size 'uses' money, maybe not directly, but at least from corporate handouts like free hosting. And once a project starts getting a fair number of contributers political problems arise, feelings get hurt, and forks happen. Quite often the forks take the contributers leaving the original project a shell and a warning to others.
	▲	anal_reactor 13 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The problem is that more convenient corporate-owned options take over, become the standard, and then the cost of running free software skyrockets. Nobody in my friend group uses Signal. I haven't met a single person IRL who has a smartphone that isn't running on either Android or iOS. The fact that not everyone looks at me like I'm taking crazy pills when I suggest Firefox over Chrome (Firefox having its fair share of drama though) is already a huge win. I'm the only guy actually running Linux as the only PC system.