"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.
I have worked with a few PMs that have been significant helps to my job but LLMs have completely destroyed my ability to work with them. "Oh I asked an AI to put together a demo for this idea and I presented it to leadership. When can you have it finished?" This is now a constant refrain, with LLMs seemingly convincing every PM I know that it is trivial to put together a reliable and maintainable system. "Oh let's just launch this and we'll fast follow with the maintainable infrastructure" and I want to blow my brains out.
The PM discipline has unfortunately maldeveloped as a place for souless MBAs, engineering degree holders who dont want to be engineers or both. Actual Product people are a small minority
Its a tragedy as its undervalued - I firmly believe apples products are significantly worse if their engineers led it. Jobs made those products
I suspect what you are really lamenting is the effects of poor leadership that does not grant a "product manager" (which is really a misnomer) the authority and autonomy to be a "product manager".
As you imply, that role is really more a director role, not a manager role. A manager managers, a director directs, including the vision and product market fit. Most Product Managers I see do not have that authority at all, and at best are constantly having to convince "leadership" like some door-to-door salesman, rather than simply updating leadership in an advise and consent format.
> Most were just middlemen shuttling information between management, marketing, design, and engineering.
well, in my experience as a developer integration between different systems with different views about how things should work is often the most challenging part of the job, so what you describe sounds like it would be difficult.
I am sorry you've had only negative experiences. Most of mine with PMs were negative as well, but a good one is a dragon slayer and bottleneck unclogger. They feel not like your manager, but like your servant, listening to exactly what you need, relaying messages accurately from other teams of what they need from you, and with the big picture perspective required for you not just to fulfill the task, but do it in a long-term strategically productive way.
> never met a PM who actual did the work of driving the product vision
I have a couple times, but they didn't have an MBA. Unfortunately though if you have an incompetent C suite or board, it's hard to get anything meaningful done no matter how good the team under them is.
Coding as such is seldom a bottleneck to begin with. How many times have you been in a conversation along the lines of "we have every detail of the product figured out, but we need another month for the coders to finish writing the code"?
The bottlenecks are almost always elsewhere. Design, quality assurance and debugging, art assets, localizations, hiring, performance management, you name it. And to be fair, AI can streamline some of that.
I am struggling to understand your perspective. In my existence, the bottleneck is always the coding.
The development team has a backlog that could keep them busy for years. Meanwhile, everyone else -- QA, localization, whatever -- operates at whatever pace the code gets delivered.
Never in my entire life have I been in the situation where the engineering manager said, "well folks, localization is backed up so we've got no more code we need to write. Go home and check in next week to see if we have any work?"
The only exception I can think of might be videogames where the bottleneck is the art and then maybe the testing loop. But gaming isn't representative of software development generally at all.
Saying the quiet part out loud. What kind of engineering org outsources this? 80% of engineering is confirming your design works, otherwise it is just LARPing.
Every time I hear somebody say a phrase like “art assets” I am humbled, reminded that not all programmers have the same experiences or work in the same environments as I do. I don’t usually think about art assets being a blocking part of the workflow because I work on enterprise information systems.
This is still part of “coding”. It doesn’t make any sense to say you’ve “finished coding” when the program doesn’t actually work as required.
I’ve been aghast to see developers present an unequivocally broken product and try to argue making it not visibly broken is “scope creep”.
I mean, that’s why we argue so much about the best ways to write code: we want to reduce the incidence of bugs and make it easier to correct unexpected errors.
Good thing those open source developers learned their craft in isolated rooms, never seeing anyone else’s code.
All of culture and technology builds be accreting on top of previous works. I can’t stand the moral outrage from people who are themselves standing on the shoulders of giants.
I work in a large enterprise where they are jumping on the product manager bandwagon as well. Personally I don't mind the idea of this role but, similar to the product owner role, it seems to be an invention of consultancies as a way to place high-energy high-billable resources at cash rich companies. So, now we're getting all these "hustlers" being onboarded who eventually don't do much other than parading around and shouting orders at the people doing the actual work.
The way I see it, product management is not a role, is a discipline. There needs to be more partnering in software. E.g. pair a project manager with a tech-lead, together they do product management.
I have worked in large companies with dedicated PM roles and mostly had a pleasant experience. Except a few instances with "real alpha male" energy who wanted me to explain myself. Fortunately this was over Zoom so I explained the problem (I had caused it) and then exited the call. Feature ultimately got delivered, was used and so I was promoted.
These people make me hate working. They don't want to pair with anyone. Understanding work at all is anathema to them. Their brains are too large for such trivial matters.
It’s actually outreach and business development but yeah it’s not coding or product development anymore. Why? because AI makes it easier to make credible sounding stuff, to maintain the appearance of progress, making it harder to tell who’s the real deal. So everyone is drowning in spammish AI. We all see it in recruiting (in all directions), it’s happening too in sales.
On top of this there’s also a confounding factor where it seems we can all do things we couldn’t before. So everyone is trying to reduce their dependencies and increase their offering. Which is driving down opportunities. The world of business is turning into one of those one-sided conferences where everyone is either look for a job, or looking for a sale. No-one is hiring. No-one is buying.
I'd like AI to be the product management layer of the client/mgmt/engineer sandwich as then it has two sets of humans checking the work that are already used to managing around miscommunication. Letting AI do the JIRA work seems like a perfect fit.
He is completely correct in principle, as most of the AI startups I have crossed paths with (I do some investment advisory) keep throwing AI at the wrong problems and/or don’t know how to mine for value in a product concept.
One thing that has changed for me personally is that these days if I’m parsing XML, I might just tell AI to write a parser that can handle these 5 XML files. It might load up a library or it might just roll its own, but one thing that is not going to happen is that I’m not building some beautiful well engineered XML parser which I then open source. I wonder if that is what’s going on?
I imagine the folks in the article and others like it are not building libraries and foundational infrastructure but rather cranking out SaaS startup ideas and CRUD web apps. I find that kind of coding really can go quite fast using AI, particularly if you are building it from zero and not worrying about all the existing quirks of a large codebase or creating technical debt.
Many people are seeing huge gains in coding productivity with AI. If you're not one of those people it might be useful to evaluate why you aren't experiencing any benefits, instead of claiming that there are none.
The second point is more incentive than AI capability i'd argue. Your point presumes that Open Source === Good. I'm not sure that's how all of society feels, unfortunately, so even if AI can do it at some point...it might not choose to.
Can I just remind everyone that GPT was released not even 3 years ago yet. It's been only 2 full years since GPT was released.
I get that people are anxious, worried, and are going through the "cycles of grief", but do you really think that in another 2 years, let alone 5 it won't be able to code a good XML library? We are just going to have to see how things go, because they are clearly going to go, whether we want or not.
And what does open source and the quality of projects have to do with it? There were bad open source projects before GPT's release.
bullshit, open source is blooming as never before. also we already have good xml libraries, nobody is interested in that. but yeah i agree with the sentiment that ai is not the magical tool you were promised, useful nevertheless.
I would endorse this position at very least directionally. The job is going to move up the abstraction stack; one person will do what a 5-person startup did, which means a founder must own more product and sales stuff.
If you like working in software because you enjoy writing code, I predict you’re gonna find it harder to make this pay. (Though leisure coding will likely get more fun, and there will always be niche CS-type roles that require inventing new technical systems.)
If you like software because you enjoy making things that people find valuable or entertaining, then I think you’ll do just fine.
> Things that used to take six engineers three months to build, "my friends and I, we'll just build on a weekend," Ng said.
There's that word "just".
There is no way Andrew Ng—Stanford professor and cofounder and former head of Google Brain who is 49 years old with a net worth of $100m and has written 200 research papers—is calling up his friends to come over and vibe code on the weekend. Does he entice them with pizza and beer? And at the end of the weekend they lean back, look at the AI's handiwork, and slap each other on the back, congratulating themselves on not taking three months to produce this thing they are going to ignore? (Or does Andrew Ng and his buddies have a new startup's worth of code every Monday for the last couple of years?)
I mean, if that was my situation I'd like to think I'd spend time coding, but herding a bunch of other millionaires to get together and think they're competing, John Henry style, with actual, dedicated engineers doing it "the old way" seems unlikely.
- in professional settings, I internally feel more pressured to complete product thinking 'faster'. I don't yet see product management being the bottleneck though, it is still code (or getting people together)
- in personally settings/side projects, def. What to build has become so much more important. But I also feel it has taken the pressure a Lil off bad ideas, when the cost of building has reduced.
You say that, but my experience has been that product managers love nothing more than feeding entire webpages/specs/slack threads/email exchanges/whatever into ChatGPT and getting the 'summary' of it, and then pasting that into Jira and having the AI "make tickets" from it
The 'more efficient' part is where reasonable people disagree, a lot, and very often, in these threads
[+] [-] shubhamjain|6 months ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] UncleMeat|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dcreater|6 months ago|reply
Its a tragedy as its undervalued - I firmly believe apples products are significantly worse if their engineers led it. Jobs made those products
[+] [-] hopelite|6 months ago|reply
As you imply, that role is really more a director role, not a manager role. A manager managers, a director directs, including the vision and product market fit. Most Product Managers I see do not have that authority at all, and at best are constantly having to convince "leadership" like some door-to-door salesman, rather than simply updating leadership in an advise and consent format.
[+] [-] akdor1154|6 months ago|reply
However your experience is not wrong: they're as rare as hens' teeth.
[+] [-] anikom15|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|6 months ago|reply
well, in my experience as a developer integration between different systems with different views about how things should work is often the most challenging part of the job, so what you describe sounds like it would be difficult.
[+] [-] lr4444lr|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] notnullorvoid|6 months ago|reply
I have a couple times, but they didn't have an MBA. Unfortunately though if you have an incompetent C suite or board, it's hard to get anything meaningful done no matter how good the team under them is.
[+] [-] xenotux|6 months ago|reply
The bottlenecks are almost always elsewhere. Design, quality assurance and debugging, art assets, localizations, hiring, performance management, you name it. And to be fair, AI can streamline some of that.
[+] [-] crazygringo|6 months ago|reply
Literally all the time? Every single month?
I am struggling to understand your perspective. In my existence, the bottleneck is always the coding.
The development team has a backlog that could keep them busy for years. Meanwhile, everyone else -- QA, localization, whatever -- operates at whatever pace the code gets delivered.
Never in my entire life have I been in the situation where the engineering manager said, "well folks, localization is backed up so we've got no more code we need to write. Go home and check in next week to see if we have any work?"
The only exception I can think of might be videogames where the bottleneck is the art and then maybe the testing loop. But gaming isn't representative of software development generally at all.
[+] [-] sitkack|6 months ago|reply
Saying the quiet part out loud. What kind of engineering org outsources this? 80% of engineering is confirming your design works, otherwise it is just LARPing.
[+] [-] Kerrick|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] crystal_revenge|6 months ago|reply
This is still part of “coding”. It doesn’t make any sense to say you’ve “finished coding” when the program doesn’t actually work as required.
I’ve been aghast to see developers present an unequivocally broken product and try to argue making it not visibly broken is “scope creep”.
I mean, that’s why we argue so much about the best ways to write code: we want to reduce the incidence of bugs and make it easier to correct unexpected errors.
[+] [-] supportengineer|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bgwalter|6 months ago|reply
"AI has made coding the easy part."
"Things that used to take six engineers three months to build, "my friends and I, we'll just build on a weekend," Ng said.
The man has a complete disdain for the field and for the thousands of open source developers whose code he is using in laundered form.
[+] [-] brookst|6 months ago|reply
All of culture and technology builds be accreting on top of previous works. I can’t stand the moral outrage from people who are themselves standing on the shoulders of giants.
[+] [-] pan69|6 months ago|reply
The way I see it, product management is not a role, is a discipline. There needs to be more partnering in software. E.g. pair a project manager with a tech-lead, together they do product management.
[+] [-] another_twist|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] GloriousMEEPT|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] LtWorf|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] riazrizvi|6 months ago|reply
On top of this there’s also a confounding factor where it seems we can all do things we couldn’t before. So everyone is trying to reduce their dependencies and increase their offering. Which is driving down opportunities. The world of business is turning into one of those one-sided conferences where everyone is either look for a job, or looking for a sale. No-one is hiring. No-one is buying.
[+] [-] another_twist|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ludicrousdispla|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jbmsf|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] d0gbread|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rcarmo|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] betaby|6 months ago|reply
If AI is that good, there should be an explosion of Open Source projects of good quality.
Neither of those is happening.
[+] [-] damon_c|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dbattaglia|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] megaloblasto|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] verelo|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jsnell|6 months ago|reply
And if you don't need one, why write one? If there is no specific use case in mind, how do you even determine what dimension "good" is measured on?
[+] [-] bongodongobob|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Kerrick|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hopelite|6 months ago|reply
I get that people are anxious, worried, and are going through the "cycles of grief", but do you really think that in another 2 years, let alone 5 it won't be able to code a good XML library? We are just going to have to see how things go, because they are clearly going to go, whether we want or not.
And what does open source and the quality of projects have to do with it? There were bad open source projects before GPT's release.
[+] [-] knoopx|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ozgrakkurt|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] antithesizer|6 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] theptip|6 months ago|reply
If you like working in software because you enjoy writing code, I predict you’re gonna find it harder to make this pay. (Though leisure coding will likely get more fun, and there will always be niche CS-type roles that require inventing new technical systems.)
If you like software because you enjoy making things that people find valuable or entertaining, then I think you’ll do just fine.
[+] [-] thwarted|6 months ago|reply
There's that word "just".
There is no way Andrew Ng—Stanford professor and cofounder and former head of Google Brain who is 49 years old with a net worth of $100m and has written 200 research papers—is calling up his friends to come over and vibe code on the weekend. Does he entice them with pizza and beer? And at the end of the weekend they lean back, look at the AI's handiwork, and slap each other on the back, congratulating themselves on not taking three months to produce this thing they are going to ignore? (Or does Andrew Ng and his buddies have a new startup's worth of code every Monday for the last couple of years?)
I mean, if that was my situation I'd like to think I'd spend time coding, but herding a bunch of other millionaires to get together and think they're competing, John Henry style, with actual, dedicated engineers doing it "the old way" seems unlikely.
[+] [-] LtWorf|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] akshaychugh-xyz|6 months ago|reply
- in professional settings, I internally feel more pressured to complete product thinking 'faster'. I don't yet see product management being the bottleneck though, it is still code (or getting people together) - in personally settings/side projects, def. What to build has become so much more important. But I also feel it has taken the pressure a Lil off bad ideas, when the cost of building has reduced.
[+] [-] joeyguerra|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] muldvarp|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] techpineapple|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jlarocco|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mdaniel|6 months ago|reply
The 'more efficient' part is where reasonable people disagree, a lot, and very often, in these threads
[+] [-] unknown|6 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] macinjosh|6 months ago|reply