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"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, clien
by crazygringo 1y ago
"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.
- bonsai_bar 1y agoGotta love that SWE arrogance.
- sillywabbit 1y agoAs opposed to the person who watched Star Trek and thought scribbling down something they saw on that counted as having vision.
- hopelite 1y agoChildren! Children! Stop fighting. We can all get along.
- gregorygoc 1y agoWhat is so arrogant in expressing first-hand experiences?
- LtWorf 1y agoNew account with negative karma… probably just created to post similar "hot takes"
- huflungdung 1y ago[dead]
- gregorygoc 1y agoDeeply 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.
- pjmlp 1y agoAll 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.
- crazygringo 1y ago> Engineers operate in the same organizational structure as PMs. I don't know what this means. Engineers are not generally spending half their time talking to management, marketing, sales, customers, and other stakeholders. > 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. Great, but ten different clients want ten different product requirements, that in fact contradict each other. And it takes ten hours of calls to talk to those ten customers. Plenty of engineers could certainly do the PM job. Many PM's come from engineering. But the point is that it's far more efficient and effective to have one person doing that, and let engineers do the engineering. That's the value. As an engineer, do you want to spend 20 hours every week talking to customers and writing feature specifications and managing a backlog? Or do you want to do, you know, engineering? Just because you could do the PM job doesn't mean that's an efficient use of your time, or what you enjoy doing.
- gregorygoc 1y agoAny efficiency gains which come from cleaner organization structure are gone because of the lossy translation mechanism between a PM and Eng team. You can argue that good PMs translate requirements perfectly, but this is a rare skill and I’m just saying I’ve never seen it from someone in this role. Perceived enjoyment of one’s role is a separate topic, but not completely orthogonal. If someone just wants to code and they force them to be a PM then their personal productivity might drop. This is why I asserted in the beginning I’m talking about feature teams, where a role fit I described is more likely. As engineering becomes less expensive with generative models I can imagine efficiency tilts even further in favor of engineers doing more PM-like work.