There used to be subject matter experts, and business analysts. Then companies combined those roles into PMs. I think the biggest problem with that is adding th

There used to be subject matter experts, and business analysts. Then companies combined those roles into PMs. I think the biggest problem with that is adding the name Manager to the title and allowing them to “own” the product as opposed to the way it originally worked where it was more collaborative and if anyone owned the product it was engineering. When I took software engineering classes in school, talking to customers and subject matter experts and figuring out what they wanted was a core part of what we covered. All these extra layers really are just an absurdity. You hit the nail on the head with your point about de-risking. It seems companies would rather hire 10x the people and spend 10x the money for a 75% chance at producing something mediocre than taking a shot at making something great. To some extent you can go work for startups to reduce your exposure to this kind of environment, but these days any startup with more than 5 employees thinks they need a PM. Don’t get me started on UX designers. I’ve taken rigorous HCI classes in grad school. It’s a real academic discipline with tons of theory behind it. What most UX designers are doing now isn’t close to that. What happened is that number of print design jobs collapsed, and everyone who had a basic understanding of design principles decided to call themselves a UX/UI designer. So now in many companies you have entire teams of PMs and designers who have next to no engineering understanding designing features and systems before anyone who actually knows how to build the thing even hears about it. My long term plan is to find some small niche where performance, correctness, and reliability are highly valued and build something that a modern software factory or a VC backed startup with a move fast and break things attitude can’t compete with. My suspicion is that what I’m looking for is a very small slice of the customer base of an existing very boring piece of business software.