Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

I feel that we conflate a lot of concepts into the term “manager.”

A programmer can almost certainly be a leader, a mentor, and a coach for a team; a force multiplier for others’ work (through tooling, code review, etc); and many other things besides — all without being a “manager” in the project/product/people-management sense.

If you make your best programmers into PMs, though, you’re effectively asking them to do an entirely different job; one whose key competencies don’t have much to do with the key competencies of programming. A good programmer isn’t necessarily a good PM. A good lead programmer is more-often complemented by a good PM, with each playing to their strengths.

Also note, that this distinction has nothing to do with running the company as a whole — i.e. being an executive or officer. Some of the best CTOs I know aren’t PMs; they’re “just” programmers, but they happen to also be cofounders, and so they participate in all the executive meetings. (In a bigcorp you’re not going to see too many cofounder-programmers, but a “distinguished engineer” is close.)

Absolutely. One of the questions I think about often:

In an organization where you have excellent coaching staff, excellent tech leads, and excellent project managers, what would a manager focus on?

I have the same question for “product managers”…

In an organization where you have excellent user experience designers, excellent user researchers, excellent tech leads, and excellent project managers, what would a product manager focus on?

I think both of these roles too often seem to become an overarching “I am the Representative of The Business Goals in All Matters” type role. And… do we really want that?

Or are there better job descriptions for managers and PMs that would create more clarity around what they are responsible for and where they defer to their colleagues?

Genuine question because I am starting a company and I will eventually be hiring for these roles and I would like to have a better job description than the traditional ones.

This one company posted their handbook on hackernews a while back. It described a system where there software was developed in small squads: an engineer, a designer, and a product person. The engineer's job was to lead the implementation, which meant they were the ultimate decision maker as the person actually implementing the feature.

The one thing I don't like about PMs is that I think the title manager confers too much power or authority. The people with the business context should be making decisions, and that should be everyone.

Product managers are (should be?) more like product analysts or product researchers.

Disclaimer: I have been a software developer, a product marketing manager, a co-founder, and most recently a senior product manager and people manager at one of the big cloud companies.

The question you pose is (no offense) somewhat nonsensical. If a computer could write its own code, what is the need for programmers? :)

The biggest value add for a product manager that I’ve seen is at the strategic level. Assessing the market conditions, being an expert in the broader space, and having a pulse on where the industry is headed. While I do get pulled into design discussions, I’d rather not, but that comes from our designers & researchers not having enough technical depth to fully create experiences and insights for the developer audience (I create cloud services for developers).

We had an interesting case recently where we rolled out a new service that isn’t seeing traction over the past year. Big investment, was initially led and kicked off by our engineering team. However, if you were to have examined the fundamental value props of the service and who this tool was valuable for earlier on in its lifecycle, some fundamental flaws in the assumptions would have popped up. Does this mean that those tech leads and engineers were “bad” at their job, or did they just not have the skill set necessary to assess the value of what they were building? Note: a research study was also done prior to building the product, which clearly missed key gaps and analyses.

How many tools should be in a single person’s toolkit? If they had involved a (good) product manager earlier on in that lifecycle, much of the current pain could have been avoided. As somebody who is currently running a side company, I wish I could hire only “jacks of all trades”, but those people are incredibly uncommon. Most people self-select into a strength and lean into that. Thus, divisions of roles are born.

I suspect there are many definitions of "good software developer". For one of this, making them managers is a horrible idea: they are strong, fast and effective contributors, but terribly chaotic in their day-to-day.

For another set of good software devs, they are very organized, care about morale and are good communicators: they become great managers.

So my answer is: your great devs could, or not, fit into the role

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