Comment by robertakarobin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robertakarobin | Hacker News Reader

Try being a product manager of a web service at a big corporation. I stopped and went back to programming because of how little there was to do. You said you don't want to manage people, but in my experience all I had to do was:

- E-mail calendar invites for a meeting

- Show up to said meeting

- State the topic, point to an engineer at random and say, "What do you think?"

- Zone out for the rest of the meeting, zoning back in only if it sounds like the conversation is starting to get off track

- 5 minutes before time is up, say, "OK, it sounds like we're agreed that we're going to do X?"

- Go back to coding side-projects

It's a funny job, because even though it's very easy to coast, it's also fairly high-visibility and in my opinion very necessary. Without a dedicated person to spend 30 minutes a day watching over meetings, things seem to very quickly go off the rails.

This can be automated. My new startup will provide "self-driving management", or MaaS, and will be called pointy.com.

Put OP out of a job, why don't you!

he didn't event take it yet !

This is the premise of Manna by Marshall Brain. The results in the story were mixed.

Thanks for sharing this. I had a good laugh. I both agree your role is necessary but also makes it feel like it’s a bit dysfunctional, that people can’t have effective meetings on their own.

Eh, it's just people being people. It's similar to how when you're learning first aid, they always tell you to not say "Someone call 911!" but rather point at one specific person and say, "You, [distinguishing characteristic of said person], call 911!"

That's a very good analogy. Much of role is just coordinating; expecting your team to self-coordinate is expecting your team to do your job for you, and leaving things up to chance.

This is amazingly relatable. I do appreciate the work, coordination and decision making that PMs drive, but in practice it does not require much work.

In truth though it does require a lot of meetings. Not great for a 2-hr work day.

I'm still not sure if you were joking or not.

Not, honestly. I'm sure it depends on the company.

If only I had read advice like this earlier, life would have been so much easier.

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