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120 points cl42 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.315s | source
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shubhamjain ◴[] No.45075187[source]
"This tool 10x the productivity of software engineers"

"GREAT! That means we can fire the people who do the actual work, and replace them with MBA robots, who neither understand nor care about making a good product"

Pardon my pessimism, but in my whole career, I have never met a PM who actual did the work of driving the product vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling information between management, marketing, design, and engineering. Thinking that hiring more PMs would increase the output in the age of AI is such a childish fantasy.

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crazygringo ◴[] No.45075437[source]
"I have never met an engineer who actually did the work of driving the engineering vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling data between servers, disks, clients, and CPUs."

You seem to have a deep misunderstanding of the value PM's provide. What you describe as "just" is a challenging job.

Generally, the vision is set by the founder, and it can be written down in a sentence or two. There's a ton of work trying to translate that vision into something that is coherent across engineers, customers, sales, and marketing.

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gregorygoc ◴[] No.45075529[source]
Deeply flawed analogy. Engineers operate in the same organizational structure as PMs.

Also, in product feature teams it is up to the debate whether PMs provide any value, if you put engineers closer to customers. For the PM role to work, they need to convey customer requirements to product requirements. I have never seen a PM do a better job at this in comparison to just sending a TL to a video call with a client.

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1. pjmlp ◴[] No.45075858[source]
All the projects I have been part of where this idea took place, either were a complete failure, or eventually one engineer sacrificed themselves into a PM role to help steer the cat herd into something sensible.

Unless it is a team of senior folks with top skills, the team manages itself never works.