The best programmers I know

Generally we aren't paid for our business expertise. In fact, most businesses actively resist giving developers deep domain responsibility.

This is manifest in management methodologies: developers are largely interchangeable cells in a spreadsheet. I'm not saying this is a good thing.

The reasons for this are complex, but generally, business people want us to solve the technical problems they can't handle themselves, they don't want us to "relieve" them of product management, customer relationships, and industry knowledge. Why would they? It would devalue them.

> Generally we aren't paid for our business expertise. In fact, most businesses actively resist giving developers deep domain responsibility.

Chicken/egg imho.

Yep. A developer with "business impact" might be seen as a liability.

One aspect might be that a developer who engages in "business" effectively stops being "subordinate". Management decisions need to be justified on a different level to maintain legitimacy.

Im somewhat puzzled as to why so many devs are insistent that being a good developer means you need to be a good PM.

These roles require wildly different skills and knowledge.

Usually the outcomes are better if you combine two people who are good at their jobs rather than hoping one person can do it all.

This thread is kind of wild and something I've never heard anywhere in tech. Every place I've worked would consider a developer at least 5X more valuable if they actually had business or product sense, and could operate without the need for constant symbiosis with a "product guy". At one BigTech company we've all heard of, our division didn't even have product people. The engineering lead was expected to handle all of the product duties, and they wouldn't hire you if they didn't think you could at least grow into that role.

It's one of the reasons I went back for a business degree and then re-entered tech. No, of course nobody in Silicon Valley cares about the "MBA" title (HN sees it as a negative), but everywhere I've interviewed/worked they've appreciated that we could talk about the economic and business impact of the software, and not just the algorithms and data structures.

Good engineering skills are transferable to being a good PM: you need to break down problems, scope them to fit a particular time allotment, estimate an effect on user experience (stats, tracking, what is a good signal and what isn't) and have the agility to react to changing requirements as things are getting built.

Why it makes sense for them to be a single person? Often, "changing requirements" really comes from an engineer learning new things (this framework does not provide this, this external dep is going to be late, I'd need to learn 2 new things so will need more time...), and really, an engineer is the first one who'll know of some of the challenges and what's even feasible!

Now, the skills an engineer needs to develop to be a good PM is good communication and ability to document things at the right level, and lots of empathy for a customer and a business person (so they can "walk in their shoes"). Arguably, all things that will make a great engineer even better.

I've been in teams where we've had a very senior, experienced PM tell us that he's looking for another position in the company because our team does not need them: we already did the stuff they were hired to do. That was a sign of a great PM who did not try to actively wrestle control out of our hands when the team was chugging along just fine.

Breaking down problems (vertical slicing) isnt inherently a dev skill. Insofar as it is a transferable skill to break down problems it is more of a life skill.

Scoping tickets is more of a project management skill. Again, not a dev skill.

Estimating effect on user experience - requires empathy, again not a dev skill.

If you redefine the dev job as including PM skills then sure, PM skills are dev skills.

But theyre not.

>Why it makes sense for them to be a single person? Often, "changing requirements" really comes from an engineer learning new things

So? Happens to me too. I can tell the PM these things i learned. Thats a hell of a lot easier than managing all stakeholder interactions, empathizing and balancing their demands.

It only really makes sense to combine the two roles if the project is inherently very straightforward, a salary can be saved and the person doing both roles is suffiently qualified for both roles.

That sounds great, and I would advise you to value it. Most tech companies are not this forward thinking (often to their own detriment)

The result of that top-down management style is buggy code, blown deadlines, security holes, and the slowest software development I've ever seen.

I've found it possible to migrate to a less top-down Desert style just by finding executives who are frustrated by those problems and saying, "I have an idea I've seen help" and then getting the team together and saying, "hey, it turns out the executives would like us to write software well. What should we try first?"

Product has plenty of work remaining: they should be handling whatever subset of strategy, prioritization, analytics, BI, QA, facilitation, design and contracts that they have the skills for. But it requires engineers to actually collaborate with them as a peer, rather than engage in power struggles, and that requires everyone on the team to understand what we are building, for whom, and why.

For any given ticket, unless you remove all creativity for an engineer, they will have to balance how deep and how wide they go, how much they refactor, and how much they skip, in order to be effective and not end up with a contraption that's extremely high risk to review and roll out to production: all of that is scoping.

If you are not doing that, you are being micromanaged and I feel for you in your engineering job.

And trust me, non-technical PMs are ill-equipped to figure out an incremental path to that North Star product or feature you want to ship — how you split branches and deliver value incrementally is something only a good engineer can do (well).

If you do not consider how an implementation will affect the user, you might just satisfy the requirement with an actually terrible experience (but the ticket never said it needs to load in under 30s and with no visible redraws and jumping elements): a good engineer will implicitly consider all of these, even if unspecified in a task (and many more, I only used an outrageous example to make a point).

Breaking down problems is certainly a life skill, but engineers are inherently good at it: it's the very definition of an engineer, and you can't be one without it. I have however seen PMs who mostly channel and aggregate customer experiences and stakeholder requests without an ability to consider (broken down, stepwise, incremental) paths to completion.

If you are good at all of these, you'd likely be a good engineer too: this does not mean that one can't be good at PM without being an engineer, just that a great engineer is very close to being a great PM too.

I am not against the division of labour and different motivations driving where each person invests their time, but if we are talking about a great either PM or engineer, they are pretty much of the same mindset with focus on different parts of the job that needs to be done — 90/10 split vs 10/90 split (and anything in between).

And finally, whether you are a great craftsman at engineering (or PMing), it is slightly different from a great engineer.