Silly Baboons, Stubborn Elephants: A Product Engineer’s Guide to Working with Platform Engineers

A while ago I was telling a friend how I was frustrated at work. I had been adding support for a really important product feature, and our platform teams were making it impossibly difficult. It felt like every line of code required a month of negotiations to get approved. Let’s be honest here — I wasn’t telling, I was complaining. “Do they think we’re idiots?!”, I asked.

She was smiling with what I thought was empathy, until I was done and she said: “You are idiots”. Then she proceeded to explain that from her experience as a platform engineering manager, product engineers and platform teams live in a parallel universe. Finding common ground is quite a challenge. I believe at one point she used the words “silly baboons” (which gave this post its title).

No newfangled live action for me, thank you very much
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