5 ms·

Now how do you get your company / do yourself the hiring of those people in such a way that you can basically just have a team of people like this work with PMs

Now how do you get your company / do yourself the hiring of those people in such a way that you can basically just have a team of people like this work with PMs to build their ideas? I like doing this FS journey myself but am stuck "leading teams" of FS/BE/FE mixes and trying to get them to build stuff that I clearly understand and would be able to build with enough time but all I have is a team of FE or BE people or even FS people that can't just do the above. You need to be very involved with these people to get them to do this and it just doesn't scale. I've recently tried AI (Claude specifically) and I feel like I can build things with Claude much quicker than with the FE/BE/FS people I have. Even including all the frustrations that Claude brings when I have to tell it that it's bullshitting me. Is that bad? How do you deal with that? Advice?

layoric 1y ago
Decoder for people reading: PM - Product Manager FS - Fullstack developer FE - Frontend developer BE - Backend developer
brazukadev 1y ago
> Is that bad? How do you deal with that? Advice? Everything is too recent, nobody can give a sure advice on how to deal with your situation. From my view as a fullstack engineer working with LLMs for the past 3 years, your generated product is probably crap and your only way to assess it is by asking Claude or ChatGPT if it's good, which it'll probably say yes to make you feel good. Now go ahead and publish it. If your app brings revenue, then you build something quicker. A Claude-generated prototype is as much a product as some PowerPoint slides
lmm 1y ago
Huh, my experience has been generally the opposite - most FS/BE/FE folks want to understand the business, and while a good PM will enhance that, the median PM is actively detrimental. Frankly if the people you have aren't good enough then you need to get good at training, get better in your hiring (does your hiring process test the skills you want? Without being so long that anyone decent is going to get a better offer before they reach the end of it?), or maybe your company is just not offering enough to attract decent talent. There are plenty of better-than-AI programmers out there, but even in this job market they still have decent options.
- mycall 1y ago
  The truth is that everyone is correct when going by past experience. With many millions of developers and PMs, all combinations happen.
  - lmm 1y ago
    It's been consistent though. 15+ year career, many companies, multiple industries, multiple countries.
majkinetor 1y ago
I have exactly the same experience as you. I tried educating people but all those developers (and beyond, up to stakeholders), no matter their seniority, do not want to get involved in the domain too much, just as little as they need. That naturally leads to me micromanaging all the things, leading to non scalability and finally overburn. As soon as I stop doing micro, all the stuff start to break down pretty fast. I wrote a book per project trying to get everyone on the same level but nah (more than 3000 pages in last decade, 20+ projects). Tried everything in hiring too, found almost nobody during all that time. I am now off the previous work and will devote time to try AI, because I concluded it can't be worse than that.
- ozim 1y ago
  That’s something I relate too as well. I like working on different abstraction levels throughout the system. Only way to cope was to let go things and pick my battles. I always think about the joke where a sailor goes down to the dock and asks dock men if they speak French, English or German- dock men only shake their heads showing no. Later dock men chat and one saying to other he could learn languages so he would be able to talk with the sailor. The other replied that sailor knew 3 and it didn’t help him.
- p_v_doom 1y ago
  Same here. No matter how hard I try, and use different approaches, from coaching, to sharing videos, through poiting out why this can benefit you personally, to showing how exactly it creates results, there simply is no interest. People don't care.
  - majkinetor 1y ago
    It's even worse than that - even the owner of the company I worked for didn't care that the product of his own company will be mediocre, while shouting generally the quality is the goal. It turns out that it was the goal as long as it was incidental and free (no such thing, but it looks that way if you are not deeply involved) and because it sounds good. As soon as reputation collides with the immediate profit, profit always wins.

layoric 1y ago

Decoder for people reading: PM - Product Manager FS - Fullstack developer FE - Frontend developer BE - Backend developer

brazukadev 1y ago

> Is that bad? How do you deal with that? Advice? Everything is too recent, nobody can give a sure advice on how to deal with your situation. From my view as a fullstack engineer working with LLMs for the past 3 years, your generated product is probably crap and your only way to assess it is by asking Claude or ChatGPT if it's good, which it'll probably say yes to make you feel good. Now go ahead and publish it. If your app brings revenue, then you build something quicker. A Claude-generated prototype is as much a product as some PowerPoint slides

lmm 1y ago

Huh, my experience has been generally the opposite - most FS/BE/FE folks want to understand the business, and while a good PM will enhance that, the median PM is actively detrimental. Frankly if the people you have aren't good enough then you need to get good at training, get better in your hiring (does your hiring process test the skills you want? Without being so long that anyone decent is going to get a better offer before they reach the end of it?), or maybe your company is just not offering enough to attract decent talent. There are plenty of better-than-AI programmers out there, but even in this job market they still have decent options.

mycall 1y ago
The truth is that everyone is correct when going by past experience. With many millions of developers and PMs, all combinations happen.
- lmm 1y ago
  It's been consistent though. 15+ year career, many companies, multiple industries, multiple countries.

majkinetor 1y ago

I have exactly the same experience as you. I tried educating people but all those developers (and beyond, up to stakeholders), no matter their seniority, do not want to get involved in the domain too much, just as little as they need. That naturally leads to me micromanaging all the things, leading to non scalability and finally overburn. As soon as I stop doing micro, all the stuff start to break down pretty fast. I wrote a book per project trying to get everyone on the same level but nah (more than 3000 pages in last decade, 20+ projects). Tried everything in hiring too, found almost nobody during all that time. I am now off the previous work and will devote time to try AI, because I concluded it can't be worse than that.

ozim 1y ago
That’s something I relate too as well. I like working on different abstraction levels throughout the system. Only way to cope was to let go things and pick my battles. I always think about the joke where a sailor goes down to the dock and asks dock men if they speak French, English or German- dock men only shake their heads showing no. Later dock men chat and one saying to other he could learn languages so he would be able to talk with the sailor. The other replied that sailor knew 3 and it didn’t help him.
p_v_doom 1y ago
Same here. No matter how hard I try, and use different approaches, from coaching, to sharing videos, through poiting out why this can benefit you personally, to showing how exactly it creates results, there simply is no interest. People don't care.
- majkinetor 1y ago
  It's even worse than that - even the owner of the company I worked for didn't care that the product of his own company will be mediocre, while shouting generally the quality is the goal. It turns out that it was the goal as long as it was incidental and free (no such thing, but it looks that way if you are not deeply involved) and because it sounds good. As soon as reputation collides with the immediate profit, profit always wins.