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Comment by roflyear | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but these things come and go. I would not be surprised if in 12-24 months Amazon has more engineers than they do today by a significant margin.

And "in tech" is right. At my current company, we have more PMs than we do developers. This leads to a really poor feedback look where the PMs are trying to justify their jobs, so they "look busy" and start generating cruft that is probably not important (like changing text without really a great reason, sure maybe it is "polish" but ... there's real things to do and it distracts the engineers).

We don't need more PMs than we have engineers!

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Whenever something that used to work fine suddenly inexplicably breaks here or changes and is made obviously worse for no discernible reason, the following exchange inevitably occurs…

“What the heck happened? This was just working last week! Where’s the… ugh! Where did the button for this go?”

“It got Product Managed.”

Google Meets and Slack are repeat offenders.

Has meet actually had any significant downtime?

Availability isn’t the property of Google Meet that’s troublesome. Itinerant, schizophrenic UI is more its jam.

For me, call quality on Meet is absolutely the worst compared w/ Zoom and Teams

I think you misunderstood their post.

Probably, I still don't get it :D

The post was saying Slack and Meet are repeat offenders in terms of breaking users expectations or their workflows due to a change-heavy approach to product management, not that they break in the sense of going offline.

Thanks! I understand now

“Downtime” is a meaningless metric. Actually working is what matters. And Meet just broke for me two weeks ago; the video didn’t work. Doesn’t matter it was technically “up”.

I've worked in this environment and it's always miserable. Developers are constantly frustrated by way too much upstream information and work and PMs feel like they have no ability to do anything.

Even if a PM does the right thing by talking to customers and learning about their pain points, the giant bottleneck in dev capacity means that those customer pain points take forever to address, which often leads to more customer frustration than if you had never talked to them in the first place.

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