I've had good PMs answer most of this themselves. Only if there's a technical detail they don't know about do they then ask specifically.
OTOH other PMs throw vague jira-shit over the fence because they know how to take advantage of seniors who have been taught to reflexively work out the details even though it should be PM's job, just like this right here:
>So we end up with “senior” engineers who can reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard but freeze when the spec is half-baked.
The story here should be "the senior engineer is senior because they tell the person responsible for the specs to not half-bake their specs", not "senior engineer is senior because they fixed someone else's incompetence", but even then, there is likely a manager that should be demanding that before the senior does.
Some of you senior engineers are less senior than others, and what I've continually seen is early senior engineers covering for other people (like half-baked specs). Eventually they learn that maybe a PM/Design should put some effort into a spec and covering for them means more work without compensation, and they stop fixing the laziness.
OTOH other PMs throw vague jira-shit over the fence because they know how to take advantage of seniors who have been taught to reflexively work out the details even though it should be PM's job, just like this right here:
>So we end up with “senior” engineers who can reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard but freeze when the spec is half-baked.
The story here should be "the senior engineer is senior because they tell the person responsible for the specs to not half-bake their specs", not "senior engineer is senior because they fixed someone else's incompetence", but even then, there is likely a manager that should be demanding that before the senior does.
Some of you senior engineers are less senior than others, and what I've continually seen is early senior engineers covering for other people (like half-baked specs). Eventually they learn that maybe a PM/Design should put some effort into a spec and covering for them means more work without compensation, and they stop fixing the laziness.