Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 155 posts

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#21

Post by crazygringo »

shubhamjain wrote: post #8

"This tool 10x the productivity of software engineers" "GREAT! That means we can fire the people who do the actual work, and replace them with MBA robots, who neither understand nor care about making a good product" Pardon my pessimism, but in my whole career, I have never met a PM who actual did the work of driving the product vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling information between management, marketing, desi…

"I have never met an engineer who actually did the work of driving the engineering vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling data between servers, disks, clients, and CPUs."

You seem to have a deep misunderstanding of the value PM's provide. What you describe as "just" is a challenging job.

Generally, the vision is set by the founder, and it can be written down in a sentence or two. There's a ton of work trying to translate that vision into something that is coherent across engineers, customers, sales, and marketing.

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#22

Post by OutOfHere »

These days, most software startups with good ideas should be self-funded. Develop the software and figure out your outreach and marketing. Reap the profits. You don't need paper-pushing PMs. If you are seeking funding for a software startup, to me it's a red flag that your idea is probably bad, that you're just taking VCs for a ride.

Hardware startups could still use funding.

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#23

Post by J_McQuade »

megaloblasto wrote: post #13
betaby wrote: post #10

If AI is that good, can someone code a good XML library with AI? The spec is available. If AI is that good, there should be an explosion of Open Source projects of good quality. Neither of those is happening.

Many people are seeing huge gains in coding productivity with AI. If you're not one of those people it might be useful to evaluate why you aren't experiencing any benefits, instead of claiming that there are none.

> Many people are seeing huge gains in coding productivity with AI.

I don't want to speak for the person you replied to, but I think that their main point is... are they?

I see lots of articles about huge increases in productivity, but I think it's fair to argue that we've yet to see the huge increases in useful products that would surely (we hope) result from that if it were true.

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#24

Post by Kerrick »

xenotux wrote: post #19

Coding as such is seldom a bottleneck to begin with. How many times have you been in a conversation along the lines of "we have every detail of the product figured out, but we need another month for the coders to finish writing the code"? The bottlenecks are almost always elsewhere. Design, quality assurance and debugging, art assets, localizations, hiring, performance management, you name it. And to be fair, AI can…

Every time I hear somebody say a phrase like “art assets” I am humbled, reminded that not all programmers have the same experiences or work in the same environments as I do. I don’t usually think about art assets being a blocking part of the workflow because I work on enterprise information systems.

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#25

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

megaloblasto wrote: post #13
betaby wrote: post #10

If AI is that good, can someone code a good XML library with AI? The spec is available. If AI is that good, there should be an explosion of Open Source projects of good quality. Neither of those is happening.

Many people are seeing huge gains in coding productivity with AI. If you're not one of those people it might be useful to evaluate why you aren't experiencing any benefits, instead of claiming that there are none.

Maybe because it's become second nature to you, due to a long enough career spent practicing the actual skill rather than using a crutch or tangential skill?

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#26

Post by dcreater »

shubhamjain wrote: post #8

"This tool 10x the productivity of software engineers" "GREAT! That means we can fire the people who do the actual work, and replace them with MBA robots, who neither understand nor care about making a good product" Pardon my pessimism, but in my whole career, I have never met a PM who actual did the work of driving the product vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling information between management, marketing, desi…

The PM discipline has unfortunately maldeveloped as a place for souless MBAs, engineering degree holders who dont want to be engineers or both. Actual Product people are a small minority

Its a tragedy as its undervalued - I firmly believe apples products are significantly worse if their engineers led it. Jobs made those products

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#27

Post by Kerrick »

betaby wrote: post #10

If AI is that good, can someone code a good XML library with AI? The spec is available. If AI is that good, there should be an explosion of Open Source projects of good quality. Neither of those is happening.

Open source projects left and right are banning contributors from using AI.

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#28

Post by dcreater »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #15

Andrew Ng has had a really sad career trajectory to a point where it's hard to take him seriously anymore. When I started in ML the very first course I took was actually Andrew Ng's course and it was amazingly good. But the past few years whenever he pops up, it always seems to be him repeating the talking points of some AI company that's paying him money. It's like seeing your hero turn into a complete sellout, shov…

Yup. I don't take him seriously any more. He's just cashing in on this hype cycle.

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#29

Post by crazygringo »

xenotux wrote: post #19

Coding as such is seldom a bottleneck to begin with. How many times have you been in a conversation along the lines of "we have every detail of the product figured out, but we need another month for the coders to finish writing the code"? The bottlenecks are almost always elsewhere. Design, quality assurance and debugging, art assets, localizations, hiring, performance management, you name it. And to be fair, AI can…

> How many times...

Literally all the time? Every single month?

I am struggling to understand your perspective. In my existence, the bottleneck is always the coding.

The development team has a backlog that could keep them busy for years. Meanwhile, everyone else -- QA, localization, whatever -- operates at whatever pace the code gets delivered.

Never in my entire life have I been in the situation where the engineering manager said, "well folks, localization is backed up so we've got no more code we need to write. Go home and check in next week to see if we have any work?"

The only exception I can think of might be videogames where the bottleneck is the art and then maybe the testing loop. But gaming isn't representative of software development generally at all.

Re: Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

#30

Post by bonsai_bar »

crazygringo wrote: post #21
shubhamjain wrote: post #8

"This tool 10x the productivity of software engineers" "GREAT! That means we can fire the people who do the actual work, and replace them with MBA robots, who neither understand nor care about making a good product" Pardon my pessimism, but in my whole career, I have never met a PM who actual did the work of driving the product vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling information between management, marketing, desi…

"I have never met an engineer who actually did the work of driving the engineering vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling data between servers, disks, clients, and CPUs." You seem to have a deep misunderstanding of the value PM's provide. What you describe as "just" is a challenging job. Generally, the vision is set by the founder, and it can be written down in a sentence or two. There's a ton of work trying to t…

Gotta love that SWE arrogance.
Post reply on HN