Paul Graham in his essay on what happened to Yahoo says:
"I remember talking to some programmers in the cafeteria about the problem of gaming search results (now known as SEO), and they asked "what should we do?" Programmers at Yahoo wouldn't have asked that. Theirs was not to reason why; theirs was to build what product managers spec'd. "
Asking, "What should we do?" is not the same as, "Why is this required?" The programmers at Google were asking directions. They were not questioning the requirement.
The user requirement must come from the user. The product manager is the surrogate user.
But programmers too are users of software products. If they are building a search engine it should be one that they would willingly use. If the people making the dog food do not like it, neither will the dogs. And as far as finding out how the search engine could be misused, or gamed, the best inputs would come from programmers (if they are good programmers). In the absence of such converstaions what you have is a pin factory.
A good corporate culture would promote conversations between developers and users, or their surrogates. To get such a culture companies must select, and reward, persons who display this talent. Yahoo apparently did not.
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