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Comment by idle_zealot | Hacker News Reader

You're not supposed to read the Jira ticket. You're supposed to paste the link along with instructions for your Claude agent to "do this ticket, no mistakes," then raise an MR for whatever it writes. The text is a wire protocol between agents. If a PM doesn't care enough about the requirements to write, or even read them, then would they even notice if the code works or not? Why would they care about that? What does "works" even mean if no human knows the spec?

How quickly we become reverse centaurs.

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> then would they even notice if the code works or not?

it's literally their job to ship functional product features...

Everyone's job is to please their manager. Their job is shipping functional product features only if that's what their manager likes. In functional companies, that should be the case. There aren't many functional companies.

> Everyone's job is to please their manager.

Indeed. I've spent my professional career seeking out positions at companies of increasing prestige and technical renown, each with a higher reputation for professionalism and performance than the last. And yet this invariant has held in every position.

As far as I can tell, the only difference between each company has been the quality of the manager I was supposed to please, which I have noticed (perhaps predictably) is not strongly correlated with the company's reputation or success.

Don't forget that they're also functionally structured. The managers don't own products or features, they manage functions (engineering, sales, design). And in practice, they usually only manage people, with little control over the function. So the managers aren't particularly interested or tied to shipping product features. The PM maybe, but they don't have reports or own much.

> And in practice, they usually only manage people …

I usually differentiate between real managers who exist to make decisions, versus those who manage people. The latter are “overseers” not managers.

We need to make companies financially liable for data leaks.

They technically are, but at least in the US we're allergic to "anti-business" punitive fines and liability, so it ends up as a cost of doing business. Wouldn't want an anti-business law to scare away a company leaking everybody's data. Think of the economy!

Yep, widespread security holes are literally a national security issue, but making things convenient for companies is more important.

In my last company, what my manager liked was an increase in AI adoption metrics, because that’s what his boss likes.

That is the current fad, so that is what a lot of bosses like. There have been different fads in the past, there will be different ones in the future. Some of the fads have a useful core that remains today, some of them are completely gone. All of them were overhyped at the start.

The practical part of their job for them is to show up and to get paid.

Who cares about features or functional - of whether they even know what functional means in that case?

That's how it looks more and more...

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