first, you’re talking about software “engineers” which means you aren’t talking about engineers in general.

and there’s a good chance none of them have ever had an engineering course in their life. they’re hackers who are good at making code.

the reason they probably seem reluctant to share is that what they’ve cobbled together with bubble gum and bailing wire is difficult to explain quickly and thoroughly AND they’d be taking time away from their assigned tasks to do so without having any change to their deadlines.

stop blaming them and start blaming their management for not giving them the time and permission they need to help you. go to the management and say you need so-and-so to be assigned 40 or 80 hours specifically to help you understand these widgets.

and in the future you need to push for clean up, documentation, lessons learned, and training to be part of every project estimate.

I’ve tried to make it clear that I’m not interested in punishing anyone for past decisions or mistakes—on the contrary, I want to learn from them to create a better process moving forward. My goal is to collaborate and make their jobs easier, not harder, but I think building trust and comfort will take more time.

I’d wager that the engineers have experienced such promises in the past and got burned. Engineers, by nature, are very analytical. Re-gaining trust that was once burned will take a lot of work. And managers like you are exactly the kind of people that burn engineers.

It sounds like your job might be needlessly hard.

Coming up with a design for a new process that will fix all issues at once is very hard; you’re very likely to miss something important. Making such a process change in one go is also hard, even if you somehow happened to end up with a improbably good spec. Doing it by interviewing people sounds kinda doomed.

An easier path might be to take whatever holistic understanding you have right now and start in some corner of the problem where there are clear issues. Bring engineers and people who use the system together. Have the people who use the system walk through their common workflow together with the engineers, noting what parts are usually hard or slow them down. Keep people focused on improving things rather than arguing about how you got here.

Together come up with small achievable process or software fixes you can implement and evaluate quickly (like in a week or two). If it works out, you have now made a real improvement. If it didn’t work out, you understand the limitations a bit better and can try again, as it was pretty quick.

Helping to deliver real improvements in a way that’s visible both to the involved engineers and the people using the system will buy you a lot of credibility for the next step.

A lot of great answers here, but there’s another possibility I haven’t seen mentioned yet. When you are gathering information like this it says to the engineer that you want to change things, and they don’t know if that change is going to make things easier or harder for them. Usually things only ever get harder as a project lives longer. So they’ll be less incentivised to help you unless you give them an idea of what you intend to do and specify what problems you intend to solve to make life easier for them personally.

Also, as an engineer, things like this I generally see as less important than making sure the product works and that development is processing on pace. Having to explain everything about my job to someone coming in with 0 prior knowledge is a huge waste of time.

One tip I saw mentioned works well in this situation: get them to start complaining about things they hate about the current processes. Everyone likes to complain because it is cathartic.

It will help if you can educate yourself before talking to them. Present the info you have and ask them to fill in the blanks or make corrections. Must engineers like to solve problems, so present this as one for them to solve like a puzzle. Engineers are generally not novelists. Don’t ask them to just start spitting out history of The Process to you.

I’ve worked very closely with engineers and I’m engineering adjacent myself. Most of the highly technical types I know in every field (myself included) struggle to talk to people about their job because they no longer know what normal people do or don’t know and they don’t want to come across as condecendong. Like for me the basic refrigeration cycle feels like something everyone should know but I logically know that actually isn’t the case and at the same time I don’t know where the laymans actual knowledge on the topic begins. Like do I need to start with explaining that boiling liquids remove heat? Do I need to start with what boiling even is? Do normal people even know that things boil at different temps at different pressures? If I start explaining any of this are they jist going to look at me like I’m an ass and say “Of course I know how thermodynamics works”? Eventually I just decide it’s better to not to talk to them.

At the same time though, if you do manage to break the ice with them then you are more likely to sucessfully get a passionate stream of consiousness rant from them because they’re passionate and now they know that you can be trusted not to see them as being condescending when they overexplain. Honestly the best way I’ve found to break the ice with technical types is to get them to start complaining about some part of their job. That also sounds like exactly what you’re looking for if you’re trying to make their jobs easier. But if they start seeing you as someone who it is safe to complain to then they will start seeing ypu as someone it is safe to talk to about other things.

Also as always there is a relevant XKCD.

https://xkcd.com/2501/

Maybe they see your job as pointless waste of their time. The engineers put it together with the limitted timeframe and budget they were given, and dont need someone to tell thwm how to suck eggs. They know whats broken and how to fix it and they know how to do it.

To make it worse, you will do none of the work but will take the majority of recognition as c suite will associate the change with consultation and not the more time or money allocated to rhe team.

The best time for analysis is at the start of the project as it reduces the learning and consultation. Now, its an uphill battle, and frankly, not needed.

As an engineer you learn to be very careful about what you say to non engineers.

A trivial example.

What if we make change x?

It’ll make some things harder and some things easier.

One week later.

Why are you having problems? You said doing x would make things easier.

More complicated example.

Can this be used for real time control?

Define real time.

Just answer the question.

I can’t it’s a bad question. I need to know what you are trying to control.

I work in a fairly toxic work environment.

The reasons I do what the engineers are doing are,

1. A lot of times people will ask me questions and I give them answers. Then something will go wrong and it will somehow be my fault that I didn’t mention it to them (they didn’t ask, and I don’t know the specifics of what they are doing).

2. I have my own goals and projects for the year. Why should I give you a significant amount of my time when my salary/bonus will not reflect helping you in anyway.

3. Job security.

These might sound bad, but that is how it works in corporate America

Edit: It sounds like you need management on board with you before you can fully continue

Maybe they just don’t like Jira and hope you will go away if they don’t engage with your process.

Keep your promises and tell the truth. If you don’t keep your promises, be the first to acknowledge the failure.

I was an engineer for a long time and among my peers the problem we had with management was often that they had a slippery relationship with the truth.

Also, demonstrate forgiveness within the organization for technical mistakes. If your engineers don’t want to share the bad decisions they’ve made, look for aspects of your company culture that punish people who admit mistakes.

One example would be times when someone spoke about a mistake they made and then was relieved of responsibility because of it. That’s an example of punishing the admission of a technical mistake.

Good luck to you. Sounds like you’re working at the intersection of management meets reality, and nobody has extra love for a scrum master.

I can recommend honestly and incremental adoption. It will be difficult to eat this whole sandwich at once.

Frankly, it’s tiresome trying to describe technical details with business analysts who glaze over something you’re passionate about, treating it like nerdsprak. If the engineer has spent any amount of time producing a solution, you can bet he’s passionate and invested. Give credit where credit is due and don’t sound like an obnoxious condescending douchbag when doing so. People can tell when a disinterested person is giving fake praise. It’s quite different when a crowd of peers is giving recognition of a job well done. And no, you’re probably not as smart as they are in their field of expertise.

Also, listen to their input. They don’t want a product with their name going live with a feature the bean counters want, but the engineers know make the product worse. It’s like a mom watching your daughter to go to prom with a cheap haircut because dad as too cheap to fork out for a perm. You know what I mean.

There are a few things you can do that will help make everyone’s life easier.

First thing, ask engineering what can be done to reduce technical debt and then fight for it aggressively. This is often a hard sell to the product owners at first because it can increase the time it takes to produce new features, at least initially. In the long term, it will pay huge dividends to everyone involved.

When tech debt gets ignored on a new project, the timeline usually goes something like this:

• Project is barreling toward MVP at lightening speed. The Product owner said “move fast, break things” and engineering is delivering based on that mindset and everything seems to be going great.

• MVP is almost ready but uh oh! Now a new feature has been requested.

• “Move fast, break things” doesn’t allow time for code that is easily understandable or extendable to fit new use case scenarios so a huge chunk of the codebase has to be rewritten to accommodate the new feature.

• Wash, rinse, repeat.

Without a major change in design philosophy, the cycle tends to get worse over time with small features requiring more and more extensive refactoring and the number of regression bugs skyrocketing. Not to mention the code base is now a disorganized, smoldering pile of spaghetti that every dev loathes having to work on. Stakeholders are unhappy. Customers are unhappy. Engineers are unhappy. Everyone is unhappy.

Second thing, talk to some actual users, people who are NOT involved in the project, to get their feedback. As an engineer, I like working on projects that add value to someone’s life, or at least make their work day easier. I want the user experience to be positive. I want the features I’m working on to enhance that experience. I don’t want to waste my time working on features that are completely useless and will be rejected by the users as such just because some VP who doesn’t understand what the users want has a bright idea. I’ve experienced this a lot throughout my career and to some degree it’s curbed my interest in software engineering, simply because I feel like a lot of my time and effort were wasted on projects or features that were DOA.

As an automation/software engineer that works with sysadmins I think there’s a natural resistance to top-down initiatives or others meddling with their processes (i.e. they’re the SMEs so just let them work). I could also see your line of questioning go into a decision to restructure and eliminate jobs.

In the first case (general change resistance) I think you’d need to come with numbers that show how expensive a dept is compared to industry standards or how inefficiency drives issues downstream.

In the second case the best way to show jobs as secure is to detail all the work that needs to be done, implying how foolish it would be to cut staff and miss even more deadlines.

Probably they’d rather drink a dogshit milkshake every single morning than use fucking JIRA, and they’re hoping you die of natural causes before you get a chance to force it on them.