Hacker News Reader

Comment by yrgulation | Hacker News Reader

Product managers and scrum masters are a hindrance. Yet another attempt at converting software development into manufacturing. Notice apple wasn't following an “agile” methodology. Nor was microsoft or google. Yet they dramatically disrupted their respective domains. Now that they do, they either stagnate or rinse and repeat whatever they built back when they did actual software engineering or build annoying features or tools aimed at managers not engineers.

View on HN

Do you want to put your career on the line deciding which features or bug-fixes to prioritize by the next release? If the stakes were that high, wouldn’t you rather have an ally who has done at least a minimal amount of analysis to determine which features you should prioritize given a finite amount of resources? If you are comfortable with that responsibility while also deciding how to implement those features than by all means ignore your product manager.

I do. Thats how i work. I feel like there are two tiers of software engineers: programmers and developers. Programmers implement spec sheets, while developers talk to stakeholders or even end users to understand what they need to build. I am the latter. I think good CS curricula should include product and project management and accounting basics. Otherwise software engineering is just conveyor belt work.

I respect that, but you still distilled an entire discipline to a couple semesters of course work. It is as absurd as an MBA saying they could be engineers because they took a few CS classes.

It is incredibly valuable to understand the big picture of the industry but it is not sufficient to distill an entire discipline to a few classes.

Couldn't have said it better.

Luckily, this gives people (like me atleast) a great shot at launching a solid product since I won't have an annoying product manager.

The typical product manager today just reads customer feedback and misinterprets data signals. They almost never have a development background where they creatively built something themselves, they always come from some wonky unrelated field... the MBA type.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com