Comment by tristor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tristor | Hacker News Reader

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As someone who moved from Engineering to Product Management, I agree with this article for the most part. It's really important that Engineers grow their product sense and other product skills. Not just so you can communicate effectively within your org with other teams and with your PM, but because it helps you empathize for your customers.

The thing a lot of engineers (including myself at one point my career, perhaps) lack is empathy for their customer. Your job isn't to write code, your job is to solve problems for the customer. The value a company generates with it's software is by taking on customer problems and making it their problem to solve. Solving the problem is fundamentally the most important thing. But to understand the problem you need to understand the customer, and that requires empathy.

Anything you do in your career that improves your empathy towards your customers will make you a better engineer because you'll make better decisions at every turn in ways which grow the business and improve customer QoL. Maybe along the way you'll also learn the value of PMs and maybe decide you might rather be one... that's kind of what happened with me.

As someone who is in the product realm, one thing that has frustrated me about engineers is how difficult it can be to get Engineers to see see where the puck is going, let alone to skate to it. Many seem to want to operate much like a computer - they take a literal input and give an exact output.

It's so rare, and lovely, when you run into an engineer who can not only figure out how to do the task they're being assigned, but run through the next couple of steps in the future taking the team strengths, company strategy, and product shortcomings into account.

> It's so rare, and lovely, when you run into an engineer who can not only figure out how to do the task they're being assigned, but run through the next couple of steps in the future taking the team strengths, company strategy, and product shortcomings into account.

Probably because engineers like that often won't want to work in environments where they're "assigned" "tasks". If you want people who take initiative and lead, you need to give them the space to do that! Otherwise, the rare successes you're seeing are from people who not only have the strengths you outlined but also have the patience, skills and mental energy to fight through a culture and process that structurally pushes them to be low-ownership task-takers.

As someone who employs both product managers and engineers, if you spoke about (let alone to) an engineer like this in my earshot, you’d be given a box to pack your things.

You’re not nearly as valuable as you think you are.

Similar to my sibling comment, let's rephrase this the other way around (a bit tongue in cheek) and let's see how you like it (and then you maybe rethink what you wrote).

As someone who is in the engineering realm, one thing that has frustrated me about Product people is how difficult it can be to get Product Owners to see where the puck is going, let alone to skate to it. Many seem to want to operate much like a stakeholder/customer proxy - they take a literal input and give an exact output.

It's so rare, and lovely, when you run into a Product Owner who can not only figure out how to parrot what stakeholders told them, but run through the next couple of steps and understand what their actual needs are vs. what they say they want, embed it in the company strategy and make time for polishing the product and keeping it up to date technically instead of just chasing the umpteenth UI overhaul fad they can present to get a promotion and be out of there.

It's possible he works with bad engineers. What he said is true of working with certain types of bad engineers, just like what you say is true of bad PMs. It is what it is. Working with people who aren't competent sucks in any domain, it's not exclusive to tech, engineering, product, design, whatever. It's everywhere.

Absolutely understood, no worries there. I think both my sibling and I were more concerned with his blanket statement approach and how the way they wrote it is quite offensive, especially if a good engineer reads it. I hope my 'returning the favor' could make them see that as I'm sure they are one of the good ones and wouldn't like to be described that way either. I have met both product people for which that description would fit perfectly though and ones that were awesome and actually knew their product well and could balance everyone's needs and coax the real needs out of stakeholders and users. And lots in between.

Yep, for sure.

Yeah, there's a lot of bad product folks out there. It's a valid criticism. I hope I'm not one of them.

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