Working at an EA org to discover needs: This seems much slower than asking people who work there, no? (I am not trying to guess the needs myself)
It really depends on how sophisticated the work is and how tied it is to existing systems.
For example, if you wanted to build tooling that would be useful to Google, it would probably be easiest just to start a job at Google, where you can see everything and get used to the codebases, than to try to become a consultant for Google, where you’d ask for very narrow tasks that don’t require you to be part of their confidential workflows and similar.
Still, I don’t think Google is a good example. It is full of developers who have a culture of automating things and even free time every week to do side projects. This is really extreme.
A better example would be some organization that has 0 developers. If you ask someone in such an organization if there’s anything they want to automate, or some repetitive task they’re doing a lot, or an idea for an app (which is probably terrible but will indicate an underlying need) - things come up
It really depends on how sophisticated the work is and how tied it is to existing systems.
For example, if you wanted to build tooling that would be useful to Google, it would probably be easiest just to start a job at Google, where you can see everything and get used to the codebases, than to try to become a consultant for Google, where you’d ask for very narrow tasks that don’t require you to be part of their confidential workflows and similar.
I agree I won’t get everything
Still, I don’t think Google is a good example. It is full of developers who have a culture of automating things and even free time every week to do side projects. This is really extreme.
A better example would be some organization that has 0 developers. If you ask someone in such an organization if there’s anything they want to automate, or some repetitive task they’re doing a lot, or an idea for an app (which is probably terrible but will indicate an underlying need) - things come up
But also, I tried, and I think 0 such needs surfaced
:)