Comment by tene80i | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tene80i | Hacker News Reader

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Well sure, I never said they were equivalent in all respects. Just that you can have good and bad versions of both. For sure the failure modes are different.

I challenge the idea that there is no skill test for PMs, though - take a PM interview at a serious product company some day.

And the PM role is of course more than just delivery. If they dropped dead the product would still get shipped. But then what? Someone would need to talk to customers, dig into data and figure out the roadmap. Other people can do it, but in a sufficiently complex company you might as well get people who are good at it and want to devote their time to it.

I understand why some engineers don’t like PMs. But it is exactly the same reason as why some PMs (and C-suites) view engineers as fungible resources who waste time on abstractions instead of shipping, and pad estimates and refuse to discuss practical tradeoffs to move quicker - it’s an unfair generalisation based on bad experiences.

I just think more respect all around wouldn’t hurt.

That's not a skill test, or you'd point to the "test" instead of telling me to interview for a job role. That's a skilled judgement.

It is a generalization, but it's not unfair. That's the mistake you're making. Is it "unfair" to call the British people Roast Beef, or calling French people Froggies. Those are generalizations but are fair (or were at least). British people genuinely eat a disproportionate amount of Roast Beef and French people genuinely eat Frogs legs.

And there are genuinely more bad PMs than good ones and lots of developers have experience "managing" their PM and trying to ensure they don't do too much harm, like the GP that started this discussion.

Don't worry, most engineers will quickly realize when a PM is good and let them do their job without "managing" them. In fact, it's a delight working with one as they do genuinely make the dev process so much better.

I’m really not sure what you’re arguing. You want a precise test for being a good PM, that can be marked like an examination with correct and incorrect answers? It’s not engineering - it’s a role largely to do with learning and measuring and facilitating streams of work across multiple different (highly opinionated!) types of professionals - user researchers, engineers, designers, marketers, copywriters, data scientists - all of whose expertise is needed to ensure good outcomes. The fact that it can’t be measured as a multiple choice test doesn’t mean it isn’t skill. But if you really want to go down that route, then you’d ask a PM to explain some ways of proving the value of a potential feature, or the different ways to prioritise a roadmap, or how to manage challenging stakeholders, or indeed how to get good outcomes from colleagues who insist that only they are the people with any kind of skill…

Don’t worry, PMs are also used to working with engineers who view their profession as the only special one. Managing that is part of how to get good outcomes.

If you’ve mainly encountered bad PMs, then hey I’m sorry for you. Find somewhere to work with better colleagues?

But you’ll not convince me that one profession is just inherently better than another. That’s silly, and speaks to a lack of empathy that is, if you’re still looking for a checkbox test for the role, the type of thing that would cause you to fail it immediately.

Here here. Well said

I think I can't get you budge position at all you because you feel people can't make value judgements. But reality is a harsh mistress, with no empathy.

If you look at development methodologies such as agile, scrum, XP, etc. what you'll notice is that originally, for all of these, there's no non-technical PM. Often the PM role is entirely absent. Why do you think that was?

Because the industry doesn't value that role. It is felt that the process generally works better without it. But C-Suite think they can delegate what should be their decision making to non-technical middle managers, and that's why PMs keep getting forced back in.

If you feel your role is so key and it's this empathy that's so important, why does your post drip with constant snark? Why can't you acknowledge other people's point of view? You've ignored most of my points, and strawmanned one, a classic narcissistic response. All I'm doing is explaining why the PM in tech workflows is generally disdained, and you're shooting the messenger. That all seems more like a lack of empathy than anything.

Well said!

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