"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.
Its a tragedy as its undervalued - I firmly believe apples products are significantly worse if their engineers led it. Jobs made those products
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.
We want PMs to understand the market, the tech, the customer, and the economic value of building a product.
We then ask them to tell us when it will be built, down to the discrete feature and function, be a technical expert for the field and engineering in the product space, ask them to convey the roadmap and timeline to customers and prospects, build reports about everything from utilization to capacity, save deals by changing timelines for “just this one feature”, participate in product marketing, and understand how their product space co-exists in the complex product offerings from a company.
“You are the Chief Product Officer for your product!” is the promise and rallying cry. That’s not an accurate description of what most PMs do and even fewer are capable of doing.
However your experience is not wrong: they're as rare as hens' teeth.
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 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.
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.
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.
Like I am saying how the current behavior of the app downright needs a big flowchart to explain and I get asked: "Add X, but keep it working for all existing users" when that means the whole freaking flowcharts needs to be redrawn from scratch. When I suggest to remove some things to make things simpler (because the users don't understand it either) I get denied because it would be too much hassle to communicate the changes.
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.
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.
Initially I didn’t mind it because my team focused on technical debt, but it pretty quickly turned sour. Having to scrape up “work” for the team of 6 engineers each morning to appear productive to management was dreadful
The developers would have to help with the requirements and planning all the code changes. That implies a huge amount of non-coding work was done by the developers.
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.
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.
On one hand, I see these artificial constraints making it hard for individuals of varying skill set (outside of the imposed constraint) to contribute better for a group of people working together. This is when startups say they are scrappier and ‘just do it’ instead of being bogged down by bureaucracy.
On the other hand, having these artificial constraints makes it very easy for hiring, training, communication and alignment, all which are also important in a functioning group.
I work at a place where I interact with customers of various sizes. Sometimes I wonder why larger companies come up with this weird bureaucratic political system of constraints limiting their employees.
Other times, I wonder why some smaller companies let their employees manager a critical system when they seem part expert but not really capable of handling it end to end yet.
Get a committee together to decide multiple products priorities, features, designs and you could be months away from having anything defined enough to code.
"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.
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.
LLMs cannot, they need vast bodies of stolen text to become remotely useful. For all activities, humans need less training material than the laundromats.
Aside from that, there are legal, philosophical and economic arguments that machines are not the same as humans and do not deserve the same rights. 99.99% of the world population outside of SV hype circles would agree with that.
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.
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.
So AI is not yet coming for good writers, performers, journalists, programmers. It’s only lifting up the bottom rungs and giving them the ability to recycle, in the way that all the bad writers, performers, programmers do. That’s why it’s so tiring to consume - it’s the automation of hacks (in the writer, journalist sense).
It also has the side-effect of preventing AI users from improving their skills. At least prolific hacks eventually got good in the past. Instead with vibe coding, your skills atrophy, with prolonged use it turns you back into a hack. So no. Coding is not going to get automated. We’re at the point where a critical mass of people are beginning to see that AI is falling short of the promise.
If AI is that good, there should be an explosion of Open Source projects of good quality.
Neither of those is happening.
First of all, nobody is writing and open sourcing their own XML parser in 2025, so that's hyperbole.
Second, the boilerplate to use most XML libraries can be copy/pasted out of their docs. So where is AI saving you time here? The prompting and other BS is a waste of time and just looks silly, and you still have to read and understand the code. At best it seems like breaking even.
I don't want to speak for the person you replied to, but I think that their main point is... are they?
I see lots of articles about huge increases in productivity, but I think it's fair to argue that we've yet to see the huge increases in useful products that would surely (we hope) result from that if it were true.
Otherwise it sounds like "many people have had their lives changed by {insert philosophical/religious movement}, so if you're not finding it true you should look into what's wrong with you."
It might be that the gp is smart enough to code without a crutch.
Makes me evaluate indeed.
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?
Most of the Internet ifra depends on libxml2, major vendors like Juniper and Cisco use it. To my knowledge Android use it as well,
Naturally, with the advancement of AI, one would expect XML would be first thing to rewrite, given that library is in the critical path literally everywhere.
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.
(and blooming would mean that there are hundreds of these)
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.
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.
The 'more efficient' part is where reasonable people disagree, a lot, and very often, in these threads
Who is paying him here?
From your comment, you can't even tell the topic, let alone the actual idea he is putting forth.
https://www.businessinsider.com/andrew-ng-vibe-coding-unfort...
So, at least his investors that he convinces are paying him. I do not know if he has other engagements in that area like speaker's fees etc.
Hardware startups could still use funding.
