PE in many US states means Professional Engineer, and if you use it in the wrong place, state licensing boards will come after you.
It would also be the Principal Engineer job title at various companies
Stop Hiring Software Engineers
21–26 of 26 posts
Re: Stop Hiring Software Engineers
#22I consider myself to be one of these product oriented developers (not sure about being 10x though). Interestingly, while interviewing this has always been my bane, as the typical interviewing process goes along the tech stack and tech-related trivia (probably because it is easier to assess), and almost never towards the product side of things. And with the tech stack questions those are always in favour who are inter…
I've felt this a lot myself. So many interviewers hate being asked "why?"
"Why this problem?" "What is the reasoning behind this problem?"
I've learned some fascinating things about company attitudes in asking these "why?" questions. It turns out that Not-Invented-Here syndrome really can be deep enough in corporate culture you can hear it in interview questions if you ask follow up questions. ("That's just what we do, we don't trust the library solution at our scale." Cool, rewriting platform libraries orthogonal to your business delivers real value to your consumers I'm sure.~)
So I'm probably still going to ask a lot of "why" questions in interviews, because it yields useful information. But I'm painfully aware from rejections how much interviewers seem to hate it.
Re: Stop Hiring Software Engineers
#23I took the clickbait, and found an article that renamed Product Manager to Product Engineer.
I would say that it is more about identifying product "quickwin": Small technical feature who solve huge fonctional problem.
I think the quick win in the example is just to highlight that the problem could have been solved by anyone with product passion
Re: Stop Hiring Software Engineers
#24Funnily enough, I came to similar conclusions and have been describing myself and some colleagues as Product Engineers for years now!
Software engineering is just a means to delivering product value.
In interviews I now primarily drill down on the company's business model, target customers and wider organisational structures outside of the engineering team. I have found these have the biggest impact on your ability to deliver product value. Everything within the engineering team (technologies, architecture etc.) is well within your realm of influence but you're going to face a massive uphill battle if the core business model is amiss.
Re: Stop Hiring Software Engineers
#25TIL that I am a product engineer. I identify very strongly with many of the points made in this article. But I have to say I’m disappointed in the conclusion about hiring. Early in the article it teases that PEs are “easily identifiable” in the interview process. But the final conclusion is to just ask general problem solving questions and not require specific language expertise, which I’d argue most companies are al…
I think the chapter named "deliver value" + the question asking is where he describes the qualities to look for in the hiring. The last part I read it as "if you keep filtering through technical stack you reduce your possibility to find these people because you will look only in a subset of the market"
Re: Stop Hiring Software Engineers
#26I took the clickbait, and found an article that renamed Product Manager to Product Engineer.
I don’t think you read the article then. It’s definitely a little clickbaity but at no point did it describe a PM
PM has always meant Project Manager in my experience, which is an entirely different job.