✅ Quiz 18 — Who Does What in Tech
Answer in your head or on paper, then open the fold to check. No grades, no timer — this is for you.
1. Match the film-set role to the tech role: producer, continuity checker, camera crew, fire brigade.
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Producer = **product manager** (decides what to make and why). Continuity checker = **QA engineer** (catches mistakes before the audience does). Camera crew = **software engineers** (physically build the thing). Fire brigade = **DevOps/SRE** (keeps the show running, including at 3am).2. True or false: the product manager is the engineers’ boss.
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**False.** Engineers report to the **engineering manager**. The PM decides *what* to build and *why*, but leads by evidence and persuasion — influence without authority. It's one of the strangest and most important facts about how tech teams work.3. Why is an engineering manager like a conductor — and why is “promoting the best coder to manager” a questionable idea?
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A conductor doesn't play an instrument during the concert and is rarely the best violinist — their job is making forty musicians sound like one orchestra. Likewise, an engineering manager manages *people*, not code: one-on-ones, growth, hiring, removing obstacles. It's a career change, not a level-up — and the best coder often contributes more (and may earn more) by staying a senior engineer.4. Your friend is choosing between “UX designer” and “UI designer” job ads. Explain the difference with the lesson’s analogy.
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**UX** (user experience) is the *architect*: designing how the whole experience works — what steps a user takes, in what order, how it flows. **UI** (user interface) is the *interior decorator*: how each screen looks — colors, spacing, typography. Many designers do both.5. A company has a data analyst, a data scientist, and a data engineer. The CEO asks: “Which customers will probably cancel next month?” Who builds the answer — and what do the other two do?
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The **data scientist** builds the prediction (the crystal ball). The **data engineer** built the plumbing that collects and cleans the customer data the model needs. The **data analyst** answers questions about what *already happened* ("how many cancelled last month, and did the price change matter?") — the tea leaves.6. What is a “squad”, and what does it mean that a squad “owns” an area?
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A squad is a small unit — typically **4–8 engineers plus a product manager and a designer** — responsible for one area of the product (search, payments, sign-up). "Owning" means they plan it, build it, test it, ship it, and get woken up if it breaks — they can deliver without asking permission from a central committee.7. Name the four sprint rituals and give each one’s rough time cost.
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**Standup** (daily, 15 minutes: yesterday / today / blocked), **planning** (1–2 hours per sprint: choose what fits in the next two weeks), **demo** (30–60 minutes per sprint: show the real working thing), and **retro** (about an hour per sprint: what went well, what went badly, what we'll change — blameless).8. At standup, a teammate says “I’m blocked.” Why is that the most valuable sentence in the whole meeting?
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Because a blocked person can silently lose *days* waiting, and standup exists precisely to surface this within 24 hours. Yesterday's and today's updates are useful context, but "I'm blocked, and here's on what" is the sentence that lets someone act immediately — often the blocker is a two-minute fix for the right person.9. An engineer asks for two weeks to “refactor” — the app will look exactly the same afterward. Using the kitchen analogy, explain to a skeptical executive why this isn’t wasted time.
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The team took shortcuts to ship fast — that's **tech debt**, a loan of time repaid with interest, because every shortcut makes future changes slower and riskier. Refactoring is cleaning the kitchen between rushes: pans put away, knives where they belong. The food (the app) looks the same tonight — but a kitchen that's never cleaned gets slower every service until one day it can't cook at all. The two weeks buy back speed on everything that comes after.10. Your colleague is about to tell the engineering team: “Add a filter dropdown to the reports page — should be a small change, right?” Name both things wrong with this sentence and suggest a better version.
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First, it's a **solution demand**, not a problem — it skips the team's thinking about what would fix things best. Second, "small change, right?" asserts the size of an iceberg while looking only at its tip; only someone who can see the plumbing can size it. Better: "Users can't narrow the reports down and end up exporting everything to Excel to filter by hand — what are our options, and roughly how big is each: days, weeks, or months?"11. Story points: a team labels a ticket “8”. What are they actually claiming — and what are they not claiming?
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They're claiming: "relative to our other work lately, this feels like one of the bigger items." They are **not** claiming it will take 8 hours, 8 days, or any specific time. All software estimates are educated guesses (unknown unknowns — the pipes behind the wall), and points exist to make guessing faster and less painful, not accurate. Treat estimates like weather forecasts: plan with them, don't treat them as promises.12. 🗣️ Explain it to a friend
A friend just became a marketing manager at a software company. She says: “I sit near the engineers and I’m terrified of them. There’s a 15-minute meeting every morning I don’t understand, and when I asked for one small change, everyone went quiet.”
In under a minute, jargon-free: explain what that morning meeting is, why “one small change” landed badly, and give her two tips for becoming the colleague the engineers love.