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Comment by g9yuayon | Hacker News Reader

Supply and demand? My assumption is the less challenging a technical project becomes, the more supply of engineering talents can work on the project. There should be more generalists after all. And dynamics of supply and demand will determine if engineers will be able to "hold out for ownership".

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What, precisely, limits the supply of people who have "product talents to figure out what is valuable to produce"? Why are are people with such skills apparently more rare than people with technical skills?

I think as a mathematical comparison. Given a successful product, there are likely way more engineers than product people.

That's assuming the consequent though.

It leads to the supply for any given experience level >0 being smaller for the product people.

Also, even in the 0 experience group, the selection will be tougher. This is independent of the measurable or existing differences in skill. The person that is best at convincing the employer of hiring them as a solo product manager is in a better position to negotiate than the person who managed to be among the five seemingly best developers.

That beats me. If I have to guess, I'd venture to say dealing with ambiguity is truly hard. As a production manager, you need to have unique insights on the market you're interested; you need to capture future trend; you need to understand human psyche, you need to convince your company to take risks and invest into something that does not necessarily have a future, you need to build trust with both the engineering team and the management, and you should be analytical enough produce supporting numbers. Many of such activities are ambiguous in nature, and getting clarity and buy-in out of such ambiguity is in high demand in the current market.

On a side node, engineers do sometimes need to function as PMs to build great product.

In my (limited) experience; a lot of our best PMs were once engineers, and they usually transitioned to PM roles because it let them actually execute on their visions, in addition to potentially more career growth potential.

Project managers having an engineering background is definitely beneficial, but should also be in their past. They should not be actively coding on the project. It's not a split role of managing and developing.

I don't think the parent implied "actively coding on the project"...at the very least, I interpreted "execute on their visions" as having been granted the authority to direct the pursuit of business endeavors that previously didn't exist.

I'm also of the opinion that a technical manager who purposely relegates engineering to a forgotten past is one who is pragmatically posturing for premature obsolescence; an axe in denial who refuses the occasional sharpening cannot be discerned from a rusty shovel and will sooner dig his own grave.

I don't think the parent was implying that either. I was simply giving my 2 cents in regards to what a great vs mediocre project manager does. I was actually agreeing with it.

I see. Thanks for the clarification.

There's nothing that limits the hypothetical supply of people with relevant skills (innate or with potential to learn). However, there is a limit on the number of people with experience in those roles - and work experience is used as a proxy for determining skills.

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