Posted by dmckinno 8 hours ago
Overall the rise of business types in tech company leadership has led to a drop in engineering quality, a rise in short term metrics, and fiascos like the COVID overhiring into multiple rounds of layoffs.
Those not on rota can either join or have their PR receive heavy scrutiny
Punishing mistakes with unpaid overtime has never been a good approach to quality. It just teaches management that they can get away with low quality because the engineers will pick up the pieces in their own time.
Let's see if AI makes PMs care for details.
Yesterday I had an interview, but I got rejected. They decided to go for a manager with a Claude subscription who vibe-coded a weather app.
This is the end of software engineering.
Then I joined a small consultancy that just lets me build however I want. There's no reviews, no sprint reviews, no evaluation. They trust that you work on what is important.
While this is a very messy and unmaintained workflow, it is a lot nicer and I am honestly wondering if Scrum is even necessary when you're only with 4-5 devs. Maybe it is to streamline newcomers? Because it took a bit of time to gather all the project info, but after that it was pretty relaxing.
I don't know, the market has shifted so much that I feel like I should probably be contempt with what I have.
Scrum is so woefully misunderstood.
It makes sense for small teams (yes, those 4-5 devs), if — and that's a big if — they work together on a single product. It is intended for developers to coordinate with each other, and also provides feedback loops for reality checks and for improvement of collaboration.
If those 4-5 developers work independently from one another, don't have to coordinate, don't need business to tell them what, out of various options, is the most important thing to work on right now, and don't need feedback from users to correct them along the way, then of course they don't need scrum.
> It is truly the next thing, and the future, probably happening in the next 2 years, or in 2 years in 2 years.
Again, that is literally OpenAI's business model: burn money building ChatGPT until it's smart enough to tell them how to be profitable.
"That's a bold strategy, Cotton, let's see if it pays off for 'em."
PM vibe coding a prototype for demonstration purposes? Might be a better use of a designer or engineers time, but okay I could see it being valuable. PM vibe coding something to ship to production? Your title is now engineer and you are responsible for your change, otherwise this is a direct path to destroying the quality of your product and the integrity of its data.
YOLO!
This was well into the "Move fast with stable infra" era of Meta, but clearly that still encouraged "Move fast and break things" for everything beyond infra.
PMs landing Prod diffs sounds like even more moving fast shall ensue.
I feel like PMs coding unlocks a whole new category of work, mainly addressing the long tail of cool ideas/small optimisations that ordinarily would not be addressed. Time will tell how valuable these items are in the long term.
And I say this as a PM.
The key issue right now is that the models falter in the last mile, and the last mile is where you need the training and experience to make sure the thing that lands is production quality.
At some point in the next few years I believe the roles will merge. I suspect that PMs will be forced to specialize towards a discipline (design, data science, engineering, etc.) while engineers will also start to see more of their responsibilities covering former PM territory. Most engineers will probably become closer to “product engineers”.
I'm pretty weirded out by some "modern" teams where you have product managers spoon feed specifications to developers, and developers focusing on nothing but the code they need to write to do exactly as they've been told.
Product managers are in a weird place. They wear a ton of hats and do entirely different jobs based on where they work. They're often really valuable, but I have some trouble putting my finger on what makes a good one. If they're good at whatever it is they end up doing, that's good.
But that’s far too much work and context switching for one person. Someone will try, but the reason you tend to build teams of specialists is to let people focus even when they can do lots of different things.
Without a PM: I conducted customer interviews, wrote up product requirement docs (PRD), and iterated with design on the mocks. On top of that, I had to implement the whole feature (while tweaking things with a designer), and also juggling another track of technical work.
This would be fine if I was a founding engineer, but I'm not and wasn't being compensated enough for the extra workload. And sure, now with LLMs the coding portion would be smaller, but there would still a lot of context switching and one might not able to do technical deep dives into things with all the meetings. All those meetings.
So don't overlook your PM.
A couple of things worth separating: strategic direction in most orgs is already handed down from the VP or exec level, the PM is usually executing on that mandate.
Now that coding agents exist, both the PM and the engineer end up prompting a coding agent. So, over time, the roles converge and product ownership just becomes part of building.
Companies without any product managers, much less good ones, are putting out profitable products all the time.
I think that all PMs will need to get onto the engineering, design, or research ladder. We are already seeing companies eliminate the function here and there and I expect the trend to continue.
One thing LLMs don't have is taste. That's on me.
A PM is not optional when you want to have developers that have time to code and don't get distracted by thirty people that all want something else and all ASAP.