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Comment by vipshek | Hacker News Reader

I don't have much to say about this post other than to vigorously agree!

As an engineer who's full-stack and has frequently ended up doing product management, I think the main value I provide organizations is the ability to think holistically, from a product's core abstractions (the literal database schema), to how those are surfaced and interacted with by users, to how those are talked about by sales or marketing.

Clear and consistent thinking across these dimensions is what makes some products "mysteriously" outperform others in the long run.

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It's one of the core ideas of Domain-Driven Design. In the early stage of the process, engineers should work closely with stakeholders to align on the set of terms (primitives as another commenter has put it), define them and put them in neat little contextual boxes.

If you get this part right, then everything else becomes and implementation effort. You're no longer fighting the system, you flow with it. Ideas becomes easier to brainstorm and the cost of changes is immediately visible.

Now how do you get your company / do yourself the hiring of those people in such a way that you can basically just have a team of people like this work with PMs to build their ideas?

I like doing this FS journey myself but am stuck "leading teams" of FS/BE/FE mixes and trying to get them to build stuff that I clearly understand and would be able to build with enough time but all I have is a team of FE or BE people or even FS people that can't just do the above. You need to be very involved with these people to get them to do this and it just doesn't scale.

I've recently tried AI (Claude specifically) and I feel like I can build things with Claude much quicker than with the FE/BE/FS people I have. Even including all the frustrations that Claude brings when I have to tell it that it's bullshitting me.

Is that bad? How do you deal with that? Advice?

Decoder for people reading:

PM - Product Manager

FS - Fullstack developer

FE - Frontend developer

BE - Backend developer

> Is that bad? How do you deal with that? Advice?

Everything is too recent, nobody can give a sure advice on how to deal with your situation. From my view as a fullstack engineer working with LLMs for the past 3 years, your generated product is probably crap and your only way to assess it is by asking Claude or ChatGPT if it's good, which it'll probably say yes to make you feel good.

Now go ahead and publish it. If your app brings revenue, then you build something quicker. A Claude-generated prototype is as much a product as some PowerPoint slides

Huh, my experience has been generally the opposite - most FS/BE/FE folks want to understand the business, and while a good PM will enhance that, the median PM is actively detrimental.

Frankly if the people you have aren't good enough then you need to get good at training, get better in your hiring (does your hiring process test the skills you want? Without being so long that anyone decent is going to get a better offer before they reach the end of it?), or maybe your company is just not offering enough to attract decent talent. There are plenty of better-than-AI programmers out there, but even in this job market they still have decent options.

The truth is that everyone is correct when going by past experience. With many millions of developers and PMs, all combinations happen.

It's been consistent though. 15+ year career, many companies, multiple industries, multiple countries.

I have exactly the same experience as you. I tried educating people but all those developers (and beyond, up to stakeholders), no matter their seniority, do not want to get involved in the domain too much, just as little as they need. That naturally leads to me micromanaging all the things, leading to non scalability and finally overburn. As soon as I stop doing micro, all the stuff start to break down pretty fast. I wrote a book per project trying to get everyone on the same level but nah (more than 3000 pages in last decade, 20+ projects). Tried everything in hiring too, found almost nobody during all that time.

I am now off the previous work and will devote time to try AI, because I concluded it can't be worse than that.

That’s something I relate too as well. I like working on different abstraction levels throughout the system.

Only way to cope was to let go things and pick my battles.

I always think about the joke where a sailor goes down to the dock and asks dock men if they speak French, English or German- dock men only shake their heads showing no. Later dock men chat and one saying to other he could learn languages so he would be able to talk with the sailor. The other replied that sailor knew 3 and it didn’t help him.

Same here. No matter how hard I try, and use different approaches, from coaching, to sharing videos, through poiting out why this can benefit you personally, to showing how exactly it creates results, there simply is no interest. People don't care.

It's even worse than that - even the owner of the company I worked for didn't care that the product of his own company will be mediocre, while shouting generally the quality is the goal. It turns out that it was the goal as long as it was incidental and free (no such thing, but it looks that way if you are not deeply involved) and because it sounds good. As soon as reputation collides with the immediate profit, profit always wins.

Yuup. I do find that most of the time business decision makers actually have no clue about quality. Especially with software products if it looks like it works in the demo/looks pretty then the quality must be good right, and these engineers are just being pedantic, cause theyre engineers.

Reading this thread brought back fond memories of sitting with front-line staff and just chatting with them while watching them work from the corner of my eye. My gimmick was to turn up for morning tea (the staff were older ladies that took homemade cakes to work), and by lunchtime have some frustration of theirs resolved.

It’s such a great feeling when you can make someone’s work better, for the life of me I can’t understand why others wouldn’t jump at the opportunity!

Sadly at current $dayjob, the devs are held at arm's length from the customer. On purpose!

Immediately thought DDD too!

DDD suggests continuous two-way integration between domain experts <-> engineers, to create a model that makes sense for both groups. Terminology enters the language from both groups so that everyone can speak to each other with more precision, leading to the benefits you stated.

> If you get this part right

And yet it's so easy to get wrong.

We ended up with something like five microservices - that, in principle, could have been used by anyone else in the company to operate on the Domains they were supposed to represent and encapsulate. This one holds Users and User data! This one holds Products, and Product interaction data!

Nobody touched any of those except us, the engineers working on this one very specific product. We could have - should have - just put it all on one service, which would have also allowed us to trivially run database joins instead of having to have services constantly calling each other for data, stitching it together in code.

Sigh.

Subdomain shouldn't be engineering related. That's putting the cart before the horse. Subdomain is more like: This barely have anything to do with that, other than data transmission (not transformation).

How you implement it, however is an engineering question. Microservice is not the only abstraction tool that exists. It's kinda the worse. You have procedure/class, file/module, package/libraries, processes and IPC. Network call is for when you have no other choice.

Yes, and conversely, in cases when the initial model misjudged future needs, the most disastrous projects are those where the requirements or the technical design flies in the face of the original model. When this is solved sloppily, this often begins the slow degeneration - from an application that makes sense to a spaghetti mess that is only even navigable by people who were around when those weird bolt-ons happened. Usually not only the code, but also the UI reflects this, as even massive UI overhauls (like Atlassian's in 2025) tend to just sweep everything awkward under a rug -- those things are still necessary to manage the complexity but now they're hidden under ••• → Advanced Settings → Show More → All Settings.

I don't suppose you have any tips on how to get this going in an org? I love where I work and I love the products we make, but my team (phone apps) are treated very often like an afterthought; we just receive completed products from other teams, and have to "make them work." I don't think it's malicious on the part of the rest of the teams, we're just obviously quite a bit smaller and younger than the others, not to mention we had a large departure just as I arrived in the form of my former boss who was, I'll fully admit, far more competent in our products than I am.

I've worked on learning all I can and I have a much easier time participating in discussions now, however we still feel a bit silo'd off.

> sales or marketing

Also operations and customer support. They are your interface to real, not hypothetical, customers.

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