I don't disagree with the article, but after working in big tech, two HN startups, a couple unicorns and others, in two continents, I don't really find this too actionable.
In the last ten years (and even in the 20-people HN startups), the day to day work of engineers has become so incredibly specialised and divorced from the needs of decision-makers and the customers that there is almost nothing I can do to influence whether someone views me as doing my job or not. Mainly because of the presence of Product Managers that insert themselves between engineers and the rest of the company.
I'm always interested in delivering value, but the fight necessary to actually do so has become stressful. It's no longer a collaboration, all my contributions must be filtered through the ego of the person speaking to decision-makers.
In fact, the only time I was actually satisfied with my work in the last 5 years (as opposed to my paycheck) was when I was acting as interim Product Manager for 9 months. Unsurprisingly, me and my team managed to deliver three projects that other teams tried and failed several times.
Most of that was accomplished by communicating with stakeholders and actually figuring out what they needed, rather than endlessly "trying to put my own spin" on it.
So yeah, I'm gonna keep delivering whatever is asked, getting the blame for bugs and not getting the credit for features. At least the pay is alright. I'm constantly searching for the place where I can actually fully contribute, though.
I don't know why but this part of your comment really stuck out to me. I have a whole different take on getting stuff done specifically at big tech companies, mainly that being "stagnant" is not such a bad thing at a place like Google or MS.
Say you're like an L-whatever at one of these big tech companies and you bring home say $300k/yr. You don't live in a HCOL so the pay is astronomical compared to anywhere else and even if you work on the same boring project for 10 years there, you can still say you spent 10 years working at MS or Google and that would get you red carpet treatment just about anywhere. I'm sure this would bug a go-getter and would certainty bug a younger version of me, but if you're that kind of person you're most likely trying to work at a smaller company where you get more say and sway.
And to add a bit more to this it's not like I don't care, it's just what I care about has changed over the years. When I was younger I was concerned with climbing the ladder and getting prompted. Now that I'm older I care way more about my family and friends than I do my company. If I was at one of these big tech companies and someone told me I was stagnant and would never get prompted I would just tell them so what. I bring home $300k for my family and I have a good work life balance (most likely). And do I really give a damn about the initiatives of some corporate behemoth, no and to be totally blunt the only thing I like about them is the paycheck and what it does for the rest of my life (all the free shit at the office is just a bonus).
>you bring home say $300k/yr. You don't live in a HCOL
Oh, I didn't know we were fantasizing about 2022.
> you can still say you spent 10 years working at MS or Google and that would get you red carpet treatment just about anywhere.
well, not in 2025. Market is rough and it's all topsy tuvrvy out there, with lots of companies pretending to hire but not.
>If I was at one of these big tech companies and someone told me I was stagnant and would never get prompted I would just tell them so what. I bring home $300k for my family and I have a good work life balance
Even tech isn't immune to "move up or move out". Google's had plenty of layoffs these past few years and that's an easy way for the gravy train to end. Hope you got plenty of savings.
I don't think this world exists anymore. A lot of people I know are stressed out of their minds for the last few years by being way overworked and under constant threat of a layoff. I'm not talking about startups, I'm talking about Big Tech Corp. But I guess the mythical coasting engineer making a big tech salary that everyone talks about will never go out of style.
That sounds great if you can ride that into retirement but if you get laid off and you start having to justify your existence again in the job market I dont think "I took home $300k for doing nothing and then got laid off" is a great sell.
But that's kinda the beauty of it. If you get laid off from one of these places the next place doesn't know that you took 300k home to do jack, all they know is you worked for a super prestigious company for 10 years and you can plausibly make up the rest about what you actually did there.
It's not like the parent would have accomplished nothing in the 10 years. I think they are just talking about framing it in language palatable to the interviewer across the table.
Even in the most dysfunctional organizations you can't spend 10 years doing nothing.
GP was achieving what their bosses asked of them. It's just that it didn't align with their own professional goals of improving the product they work on.
Sorry, 20 years experience of actually doing things here. I've spent 10 of those years now doing consulting with everyone from 3-person pre-series-A startups all the way up to the Fortune 50.
Let me unequivocal: you can spend 30-40 years at a company doing absolutely nothing while getting paid for it.
Do not let anyone try to convince you otherwise. I've seen such much unethical bloodsucking in my career that at this point I wouldn't mind seeing a few companies collapse under the weight of their own karma.
“Absolutely nothing” is still doing what is asked of you by a boss. Unless you’re talking CEOs fooling the board, of course.
Not contributing meaningful things is an arbitrary metric that is often only used to put people down. One can build the whole product and there will still be some asshole claiming they did the easy part or “you didn’t work enough in it to know what’s like”.
The incompetence here lies 100% with person keeping the employee.
oh man, respectfully but this cannot be further from the truth. SWEs have successfully convinced everyone that profession “is not about just coding” (you see a sea of these statements here on HN in 100x daily posts “will LLMs replace us”) and hence tools like Jira only amplify ability to do (mostly) nothing
unfortunately I have. It is indeed a hellscape of, as the kids say, "aura farming". Microsoft really seem to want to turn it into Instagram for some reason.
For many people expenses expand to fill income. Some people think that the real brilliant investors of the bay area are the real estate investors who captured all the value.
That’s only $3M total gross. You paid over $1M in taxes across fed, state, and FICA. You probably spent over $500K if you lived quite frugally. That leaves maybe $1.25M plus some growth on that. Call it $1.5M. That will give you $60K/yr in income with high likelihood to last 30+ years. Pay taxes on that and you’re living in less than the $50K/yr you were living on before plus you have to buy health insurance.
This becomes quickly apparent in a smaller company or if you have a manager that knows what they are doing.
You'll get hired, if you pass the technical interviews, but if you cannot contribute at the level they hired you, you'll be exited and that will be suspicious for your next application.
> This becomes quickly apparent in a smaller company or if you have a manager that knows what they are doing
Sounds like an unlikely problem and by then you can pull a reverse end run around your manager to their manager who doesn't know what they are doing and will believe anything the guy who worked at google says.
I've had a very hard time with the Product Manager discipline. From the books and podcasts like Lenny's, it all makes perfect sense, but it seems like in practice it is as you described - they've inserted themselves in between and often don't represent either side well. It's lead me to develop product management skills myself, which are honestly incredibly useful in avoiding wasted effort. But it does make me wonder whether the dichotomy is worth it or if product management should be part of a senior engineer's skillset.
I never really worked with a PM that was good at preventing wasted effort. Or even mediocre at it. Most assumptions I saw them making were incorrect, unless it was a VERY SIMPLE product.
To me this is something that engineering should be doing, just like splitting tasks and double-checking designs.
Of course not every engineer can do it, but some of us have been doing it, negotiating deadlines and deliverables our whole careers. So I don't really understand why our industry insists on having us throw away those abilities.
On the other hand, I've seen engineers make unilateral decisions that had completely unacceptable UX or ops impacts, that didn't align to the original design spec, and that they didn't think to tell anyone about until way down the road.
Everyone needs a counterpart to "trust but verify".
At my company, engineering managers are ultimately responsible for the deadlines and deliverables. It's an anti-pattern for PMs to also be the project managers - that is a bad combo and it should either be owned by the EMs or a dedicated role.
Yes, I feel like most Product Managers I’ve worked with are more like Project Managers - all about deadlines, largely just accepting requirements rather than refining, etc.
That and having knowledge of the constraints helps us build the best systems. Often I’ll see Product decide an initiative is a 2 quarter affair, then from then on it is always in the backlog, never to be worked on.
Meanwhile we could deliver the first increment of value next week with a little strategy applied - had we even been consulted.
Frankly, for me, the best value product managers can provide is being the buffer and/or unblocker. I want other team C to do task X, because it unblocks my team and others, but somehow I can't convince team C to do it. Well, that becomes the product managers job. They _should_ know the path to delivery and understand why this is important and negotiate with team C to drop other stuff to deliver X. And they can tell anyone above team C why this is happening. And I have worked with some product managers like that, but unfortunately they are rare, and most just get bullied by stronger willed (obstinate) tech teams. It isn't an easy job.
I'm quite fortunate that at the moment I have a great relationship with all of our peer teams and we generally sort it out amongst ourselves. We don't have a product manager involved at all for the last few years.
IMO a lot of the product managers inserting themselves and being useless is good old school project managers pivoting to the new thing and doing the same old stuff. Likewise I do think product management should be part of the senior engineers skillset. Its incredibly useful. Conversely, there are also tons of engineers that dont have this mindset and want a PM to tell them what to do and a barrier from the rest of the organization... which boggles my mind to be fair
Yes, a lot of folks really don’t want to have to care about work. I think it’s simply rubric achieving - them playing out the same thing they did in school. Operating under the constraints of their roles only enough to sustain them, so they can enjoy their lives at recess, so to speak. I get it, though - engineering can’t be everyone’s passion, there must be quite a lot of us just here for the lifestyle.
That's an interesting observation. After some thinking, I agree. It was quite hard to get the PM that replaced me out of the "project management" mindset when she joined.
Also agree about engineering needing to have the PM skillset. Especially in startups.
As a PM I've always held the opinion that I'm genuinely not needed for a ton of work if the lead engineer is reasonably product-minded and understands current customers. Most existing customer pains are plainly evident and so long as it's not a wild amount of work, my job is to just give a thumbs up and move on.
Where it gets nasty is the new opportunities. Assuming your system of patronage at a company is a good one, there's a lot of work in finding new opportunities in the first place and testing them out. And often the cat herding of developers who do some of this (great!) but want to just run wild without testing any of their assumptions (not so great!) and trying to balance the excitement and creative forces with whatever framing is needed to satisfy others in the company. That gets most complicated when various stakeholders hold opposing positions on "what we should be focused on", and if you don't have a PM absorbing that damage for you, you're just going to end up doing that all day instead of building software.
One of the functions Product Management is to be an intermediary between the business/sales and Engineering. Sometimes you might have issues working with Product Management, but you don't want to interact and build features for a bunch of stressed sales folks, so they can make their quota.
It would be very hard for a company to build a sustainable business that way.
I forgot to follow up here, so apologies for the delay. Honestly, concise is a challenge here. Here is a lot of words, and they barely scratch the surface, but just in case they might be helpful:
- Embracing the idea of a manual valuable process is a great one - as engineers we often want to start by automating and/or building, and dive right in - only to realize later we either didn't understand the product, or our stakeholder didn't and now wants changes once they've seen what it does.
(Deeper dives here: "Escaping the Build Trap"[1], "The Minimalist Entrepreneur"[2]
- Understanding negotiation is extremely helpful as you are often operating under constraints, and need to get those across to your stakeholders such that you can both move forward together. Negotiation is basically about aligning two stakeholders with different goals and arriving at an arrangement they can both live with. (Highly recommend "Negotiate without Fear"[3])
- Another excellent concept surrounds the theory of constraints and getting good at recognizing bottlenecks, and subordinating all other processes to them. Essentially, if work is piling up somewhere, look at where it is coming from, and attempt to re-route those efforts to something productive (the bottleneck moves the same speed regardless of how much work is piled up in front of it). The classic book on this matter is "The Goal"[4] but a fun retelling more oriented around an IT department is "The Phoenix Project"[5].
It took me years to realize it but I became kind of a magnet for dysfunctional organizations. Apart from the current one and the previous YC startup, it was just bloated places that barely shipped anything.
communication is probably the most important skillset in any organisation and 9 months of interim work is not sufficient enough for you to realize it.
so this reads like any other salty engineer who thinks he's smarter than everyone in the org, business people are useless and if only he would yield decision power, all issues would be solved immediately.
but guess what, it's usually not true and that mindset is usually not good to collaborate with either.
I guess actually delivering work according to specifications and making both stakeholders and customer's lives easier is never gonna be good enough for the peanut gallery.
And it's not about having "decision power", whatever that means. I was there to collaborate, listen, document, communicate down and deliver. And I did. I got my raise, my team got raises, projects were completed, management was happy, customers are using it to this day.
I wanted to be in control of my career and my output like the article describes. For nine months, I was.
The CTO was about to be fired, so I had nobody to fight for me. The Chief of Product didn't like the optics of a non-PM being more successful than a PM in delivering work.
(EDIT: As I said, I delivered from start-to-finish 3 projects that other teams had considered "impossible", mostly because of bad specifications and overengineering, often caused by PM miscommunication. The PMs of other teams REALLY took the blame here: one was fired and sued by the company before I joined, and the other confessed to me he was "asked to leave")
As for why I don't change careers, I'm an Engineering Manager and I made twice as much money than a senior PM at my previous organization.
I still long for a position where I can be both technical, product and business minded. But I guess the only job where I can do that is as a founder.
That is one big reason I want to remain an IC for my career. There's slightly less ego to deal with and usually more passion among people compared to management. That passion is pretty much the main thing keeping me in this career.
There seems to be, at least in more enlightened companies, a slight momentum away from the current "classic" org structure of having separate Product and Tech departments staff dysfunctional Scrum teams. Going towards smaller delivery teams and managers who cover product as well as people leadership. The Basecamp folks have been doing this for a while, apparently.
This might open another chance for you to use all your skills.
(Of course, you cannot find this in any MBA program afaik, they all seem to teach the CPO/CTO Enterprise Slow-Motion Scrum blueprint, so if the tide will turn, it will take a while...)
I also find the "classic" org structure quite limiting. I've found that experienced "builders" can take on more senior functions such as people management and product management. No matter if their original speciality was dev, UX, or QA. Today I consider the simple-minded hierarchical structures most companies build, as well as their dysfunctional team structures, a colossal waste of talent and energy.
I ended up leaving the big enterprise I was and joined a YC startup, now I'm back in my element a bit more. I'm still afraid of it growing too much, but maybe it will be the push I need to try my luck being a founder.
I agree with what you said about builders, I really wish there was a path that goes from engineering to engineering+product+business that isn't "founding CTO"! :(
I did this myself and ended up with a really satisfying 4ish years as a PM.
That being said while I was perhaps fairly cynical about why PMs needed to exist before trying the role myself, after being in the role for an extended period of time, fully understand why the role exists now.
Of course there can be bad PMs, a good/great one is super worth it.
This really depends on the company. There are many companies where eng has way more weight than PM. And that eng aren't so divorced from customers. Even big tech.
Good PMs are worth their weight in gold and actually make engineers' jobs easier.
Bad PMs create a useless "translation" layer that doesn't help anyone (except, perhaps, themselves.)
Good ones can shave days off complex tasks, and even help the code be more beautiful.
Bad ones can turn a 5-min feature into a week's worth of work. For absolutely no gain, and possibly creating a few bugs along the way.
Unfortunately the only way designers and PMs can learn this is by working together with engineers. Everyone needs to check the ego at the door. Which is borderline impossible with some personalities (from all sides).
Communicates well, focuses on the people, problems and solutions, not tools and processes.
Example: good PM will build a mock up of a UI, go over it in detail with engineers, then let them break up their own work. They are focused on the actual product. Bad PM will write 10 Jira tickets without any real context, assign them without discussion, then add 20 different tracking fields that nobody will use.
> it seems to me the best PMs are the CTO and the early engineers who has near infinite business and user context.
That's basically the role of the PM: to have all the business and user context and to use that to harmonise vision between the various "stakeholders" (parts of the business, users/clients, etc). But one doesn't have to be the CTO or an early engineer to have this context/skillset.
Same experience, IME founders make amazing PMs, because they care about the company and they care about people not wasting their time.
Not OP, but I can answer:
They're ok with ideas coming from someone else, check the ego at the door and listen to both engineers and customers. They make engineers work less and produce more value. Most important, they don't have a "vision", they help organize the team so the team has a shared vision built by the team.
EDIT: Also: They're not competing with the engineering manager or lead developer for some sort of leadership. They're talking with customers instead of asking sales to do it. They're working on the product aspect of tasks instead of offloading them to engineers.
> They're not competing with the engineering manager or lead developer for some sort of leadership.
Yep. Most of the managers that I've had that have been promoted from engineering have felt that their role is also tech lead, and have been poor at both being a tech lead and a product manager.
Was a PM before I went off and started my own non-tech company.
My definition of a good PM is someone who can champion both customers/users and developers concurrently, while sticking to the company's value prop and competitive edge.
In some cases, it's boiling down the needs of the customer into something achievable before sales gets in the way with over-promising and under-delivering. In other cases, it's telling the executives to stop wasting engineering's time with excessive meetings and scope-creep. It could be simply going and getting the engineers coffee. It could also be telling engineering to stop over-engineering the MVP and to simply get what needs to be done, done.
In simple terms, someone who can go to bat for any facet of the company at any time externally or internally, in order to make sure right product is being built in a timely manner that aligns with both business needs and most importantly, customer needs.
A good PM should effectively get out in front of the sales team to make sure customers/users feel heard and understood, and also to communicate to the customers/users what is and isn't possible within a given period of time.
A good PM should also know how to communicate a "no" to anyone in the business cycle from anyone else in the business cycle. Their job is effectively to be the firewall/filter from one team to another.
No, customers don't want Feature XYZ even though engineering wants to build it
No, engineering can't build Feature ABC even if a customer wants it
No, sales cannot promise Feature 123 to customer, especially without checking with engineering first.
No, executives can't force engineering to focus on the CMO's pet project, or force sales to hit numbers if the product sucks or isn't what the market wants
My previous PM was ultra valuable. Put devs in contact with the customers, got out of the way of deciding what to build, and then sheltered the devs from the chaos of customers. He was also smart about what could be done and in what timeline, always working from the estimates engineers gave, working backwards and deciding what scope could be cut and where, who if another team could loan us people. He was the right balance of umbrella, partner and pass through. It was magnificent.
My company, being more than a little bit toxic, he got transferred to a new manager who took an instant dislike to him and he was pulled off all his projects and then fired for not delivering anything. (bit of an exaggeration, he got put onto one of those "all responsibility, no authority" type projects where he was responsible for making sure everyone at the company stopped using the VPN, but he had no authority to force teams to build or migrate services to be available outside the VPN, and there were 2+ decades of services to migrate, and he couldn't direct people to stop connecting to VPN if they needed something that was inside the VPN)
The PM that came along to replace him described himself to all the engineers as "the next Elon", wouldn't let engineers talk to customers, personally decided what features to build with no input from the dev team, even when making technically difficult decisions. He asked for estimates from devs but never used them. Often giving us both half the time asked for, and half the engineers asked for to deliver a project. He never deflected chaos from customers, just added a translation layer that made it impossible to make the customers happy. Everything was an emergency, every feature necessary for an MVP. He'd constantly harass people for status updates, forget what they were working on and harass them again. He constantly asked for documents to be written for himself that he never bothered to open the links too.
He was actively toxic, wrong and an impediment.
He'd send out launch announcements to the org celebrating the projects that were completed and it was customary to list key people who delivered the project. He'd forget whole teams of people that worked on the project. One time he left me off of a project that I lead, got everyone in our sibling team that was helping out though. One person he never forgot to list as being a key person involved in the project was himself. Even in projects he had never heard of before having to write the launch announcement.
That behavior was rewarded, for whatever reason. Although he finally left the company when one of the many rounds of "you must work from the same office as your manager" bullshit caught him up and he wouldn't relocate from canada to the US.
That's my experience with PMs (of all flavors of P; Product, Project, Program). A good one is invaluable and can really accelerate and unblock a project, especially one with a broad scope and many teams that depend on each other. A bad one is an active impediment and prevents actual work from getting done. I'd rather have no PM than a bad one, but a good PM is worth their weight in gold.
> That behavior was rewarded, for whatever reason.
Sounds like you're describing someone with narcissistic personality disorder. Such people are often extraordinarily good at convincing the people above them they walk on water while shitting on everyone below them.
My greatest wish is for managers to be trained to recognize people with NPD and other disorders and to remove them from the company quickly. They can cause tremendous damage to the organization in a very short time.
I left the government for corporate work, and we didn't have project managers as a specific role. Of course, people were managing projects, but it was nothing like it was in the government. In my short experience, project managers:
- Have no understanding of the technology they're "building."
- Don't understand who is responsible for what.
- Would have NO idea if things were set up incorrectly.
- Are solely working through a checklist of items and asking "is this done, or do you have dependencies?"
- The checklist itself was just built by interviewing different stakeholders, but it's the PM who puts it together and of course the PM who doesn't really understand the detailed or high level view of the project.
It's pretty maddening, and self-evidently stupid. I really cannot fathom why my company and other companies fail to understand what a waste of time and money this is. And worse, than the PMs are often leading to worse outcomes. Please keep this in mind anytime someone tells you that we need to "run government like a business," or suggests that businesses are wildly efficient whereas government is never efficient. If we had EVER had a useless PM like this back in government I would have forced them off the project as part of our criteria for success. In the corporate world, there's really no such option, because project success is always secondary to the businesses wants.
> It's pretty maddening, and self-evidently stupid. I really cannot fathom why my company and other companies fail to understand what a waste of time and money this is.
Tell me about it. I think its because of established common sense and practice that are deeply entrenched on one hand, people that dont really question or think it through on the other and inertia on the third. I work in a project company and the level of useless tools and stuff that gets in the way is crazy. Its like an artifact of the 60s or something.
Or at least hold them accountable for failing to get things done and communicating badly with developers. Which is something that I'm yet to see.
In previous companies, as an engineering manager, I had to burn a huge amount of political capital to steer my team in the right direction, several times.
My people (engineers) want to achieve their goals and create value, and the higher-ups want working software making money. I don't see why this has become so hard to achieve.
But that can go both ways. As a PM at a previous "engineering-led" company I was on more than one occasions given a prototype that Engineering had been working on for several months (with zero Product awareness, let alone input), and told "here, shoehorn a PRD and PMF around what we already built".
In this case, the failure was my PM leadership.
I said "I'm not sure about this, I think we need to do more research and figure things out", and got called out for "not being a passionate advocate and evangelist for my products".
So I dug in, and with many iterations, and experiments with Engineering we came to something that did have some traction...
"You need to strongly hold your opinion!" (Uhhh...) "Four months ago you weren't convinced about this, now you are!"
It's all about the political capital, whomever you are. Sadly.
It doesn’t matter how much you work or how quantitatively successful you are, there will always be a narcissistic asshole ready to put you down for some made up reason.
By shielding decision-makers/customers and engineers.
To give an example of when I had to burn political capital:
I had to "skip rank" a few times and go directly to CEOs. They are appreciative when you provide concrete facts, such as "I worked for two weeks on the redesign of this page that zero people use and I'm frankly tired of this bullshit".
CEO's and VP's and customers appreciate this type of work, but YMMV. Speaking from experience, you'll be surrounded by more enemies in your day-to-day when the side effect of your customer obsession negatively impacts the KPI's that are used to stack rank your direct management chain against other teams and managers. it is quite kafkaesque to be treated as the black sheep after you save $10m a year for the org, then get a pay decrease + meets expectations 8 months later.
Your reply sounds too ironic and too real at the same time. :D
But you're 100% right. You have to know when to use the nuclear button. And sometimes you can't press it, which means you take a backseat and watch the company burn money for no reason. This is the point where I start agreeing with _fat_santa's post [1].
I think liability is more important. In my anecdotal experience, PMs are eager to take credit for successes while passing blame for failures. If a PM "owns" a product and calls the shots, it should be crystal clear to leadership that they're accountable for outcomes.
So you’re saying the only time you were satisfied with your work is when you took the role of a product manager who stepped in between the engineers and the rest of the company and had all their contributions filtered through your ego?
- I didn't step in between engineers and the company. I am an engineer.
- I didn't step in between my team and the decision makers. It wasn't me who "invented" the requirements, nor it was me who said the projects were complete.
- It was the only time in the last few years where I could actually follow the advice in this article and ship things people need. Because I could TALK with people.
- My entire team got salary increases all across the board.
- Everyone has an ego, and everyone has a personality. But nobody in a team should get to put "more" of their personality over the others. We had brand guidelines and accessibility requirements, but other than that we decided things together.
In the last ten years (and even in the 20-people HN startups), the day to day work of engineers has become so incredibly specialised and divorced from the needs of decision-makers and the customers that there is almost nothing I can do to influence whether someone views me as doing my job or not. Mainly because of the presence of Product Managers that insert themselves between engineers and the rest of the company.
I'm always interested in delivering value, but the fight necessary to actually do so has become stressful. It's no longer a collaboration, all my contributions must be filtered through the ego of the person speaking to decision-makers.
In fact, the only time I was actually satisfied with my work in the last 5 years (as opposed to my paycheck) was when I was acting as interim Product Manager for 9 months. Unsurprisingly, me and my team managed to deliver three projects that other teams tried and failed several times.
Most of that was accomplished by communicating with stakeholders and actually figuring out what they needed, rather than endlessly "trying to put my own spin" on it.
So yeah, I'm gonna keep delivering whatever is asked, getting the blame for bugs and not getting the credit for features. At least the pay is alright. I'm constantly searching for the place where I can actually fully contribute, though.