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My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

ddmckinnon.com

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Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#131

Post by titanomachy »

gzread wrote: post #127
titanomachy wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working as a SWE at Meta in the US pays 3-5x more than a European tech job (outside of Switzerland). They are paid for it. Paid oncall in US big tech is the exception rather than the norm (notably, Google has paid oncall)

How does it work out with cost of living?

This is of course a complicated question. The US has many tax jurisdictions and widely variable cost of living, and jobs vary a lot. But I could compare, say, a Google engineer in Paris vs Seattle.

A Google senior software engineer in Paris earns €168k per year (according to levels.fyi) and takes home €96k after a 43% effective tax rate. A Google senior engineer in Seattle earns €336k and takes home €239k after 29% taxes, a 2.5x increase in take-home pay. According to Numbeo, cost of living in Seattle is 15-25% higher.

Of course, in America you have to fund your own retirement. As long as the pensions plans remain solvent, "savings" are a lot less important in Europe.

Anecdotally, I know people who were able to opt out of working altogether after 10-15 years in a large tech company in the US. I don't think this is common in Europe.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#132

Post by dormento »

ramon156 wrote: post #58
Bridged7756 wrote: post #33

Our job is done for. We will be shown the door, and everyone will rejoice. Everyone will live in a happy world where you'll doddle a house and Claude will build you a next generation SaaS that makes you millions. Managers will do the job of engineers, by just telling LLMs to make an app or to make money or something. C-suites will have agents doing the jobs of managers, and CEOs will run entire companies with a Claud…

I got laid off at a job where this applied, then at another company got rejected because they cancelled the position altogether to use Agentic Coding by Microsoft instead. Then I joined a small consultancy that just lets me build however I want. There's no reviews, no sprint reviews, no evaluation. They trust that you work on what is important. While this is a very messy and unmaintained workflow, it is a lot nicer a…

A wise person once said "scrum turns dysfunctional teams into average teams. It also turns highly-motivated teams into average teams".

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#133

Post by zombot »

krzat wrote: post #118
Bridged7756 wrote: post #33

Our job is done for. We will be shown the door, and everyone will rejoice. Everyone will live in a happy world where you'll doddle a house and Claude will build you a next generation SaaS that makes you millions. Managers will do the job of engineers, by just telling LLMs to make an app or to make money or something. C-suites will have agents doing the jobs of managers, and CEOs will run entire companies with a Claud…

The end game is Zuckerberg sitting alone in his bunker and vibe-ceo'ing all of facebook.

He'll also have to be vibe-eating because nobody is vibe-growing food any more. Everybody's too busy vibe-vacationing.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#134

Post by zombot »

intelVISA wrote: post #124
Bridged7756 wrote: post #33

Our job is done for. We will be shown the door, and everyone will rejoice. Everyone will live in a happy world where you'll doddle a house and Claude will build you a next generation SaaS that makes you millions. Managers will do the job of engineers, by just telling LLMs to make an app or to make money or something. C-suites will have agents doing the jobs of managers, and CEOs will run entire companies with a Claud…

I appreciate this is satire, or marketing, but I'll engage: in this scenario how is the SaaS generating millions if anyone can just prompt their own?

Apparently it never occurs to the Believers to ask this exact question. They will pay an expensive subscription to vibe-earn money without working.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#135

Post by geooff_ »

One thing missing from this discussion is the blast radius of the product or repo in question.

Let PMs land new widgets on internal dashboards or CSS changes in internal tooling. The same way we should be aspiring to build tools for devs to merge these same changes with minimal test plans. You wouldn't call a mechanic to help you turn on your windshield wipers.

Changes in high-risk environments should be gated for people who actually know what they're doing. That high bar should remain high.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#136

Post by jmull »

jwilliams wrote: post #97

I read takes like this and I feel like it's gatekeeping. I love writing software. I love that others are now getting to share this. I think the issues here are valid. Equally there is lots of hard engineering work to reduce these issues. That's where I'm putting more energy. My scale is decidedly non-Meta, but we're investing to make the whole team able to get their own PRs up. It's not been without it's bumps, but o…

Don't ignore the context here. These are people hired to develop software for a company. They have an obligation to do so efficiently, with sufficient quality, and while balancing the company's short term and longer term business needs.

I think it's great that software development has been opened up by LLMs. Everyone should at least try it, IMO.

But your company's source isn't your personal playground and you shouldn't treat it as such.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#137

Post by joe_mamba »

titanomachy wrote: post #131
gzread wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it work out with cost of living?

This is of course a complicated question. The US has many tax jurisdictions and widely variable cost of living, and jobs vary a lot. But I could compare, say, a Google engineer in Paris vs Seattle. A Google senior software engineer in Paris earns €168k per year (according to levels.fyi) and takes home €96k after a 43% effective tax rate. A Google senior engineer in Seattle earns €336k and takes home €239k after 29% t…

>Of course, in America you have to fund your own retirement.

Isn't social security a thing? Plus employer funded 401K also?

>As long as the pensions plans remain solvent, "savings" are a lot less important in Europe.

"As long as" is doing a lot of lifting here, and that's enough if you're lucky enough to own your own property and not have to pay market rate rent at your old age.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#138

Post by [deleted] »

akshay2603 wrote: post #120

I am one of those PMs at a big tech that just shipped a PR in prod: My take: 1. Doing this moves my team faster. I now use sourcegraph MCP all the time to file much better bugs. And when the actual bug fixing TAT is larger than bug filing TAT, I rather just do it myself. My engineers appreciate it, truly. 2. This not only helps me do bug filing but just get comfortable with code. And this improves my PRDs, my MVPs an…

[deleted]

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#139

Post by iknowSFR »

elif wrote: post #128

Agree with this take for the most part. Vibe coding is bad enough with an engineer in charge. Without a computer science background or engineering experience it's way too easy to go off the rails. The exception would obviously be all the skilled coders who got turned into PM's over the years due to bad salary/title structures or poor organization structure.

I am a bit confused with the consistency of this community in speaking about MBA’s running their orgs or PM’s making bad decisions… it feels like more resistance by engineers to learn business than the business side not learning code. What I mean is that what a company values seems to be widely understood and the reaction from HN is “they’re wrong.” If anything, this is the green light for engineers to step into the business side and fix all the complaints they’ve had for decades.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#140

Post by ryanmcl »

nananana9 wrote: post #125
akshay2603 wrote: post #120

I am one of those PMs at a big tech that just shipped a PR in prod: My take: 1. Doing this moves my team faster. I now use sourcegraph MCP all the time to file much better bugs. And when the actual bug fixing TAT is larger than bug filing TAT, I rather just do it myself. My engineers appreciate it, truly. 2. This not only helps me do bug filing but just get comfortable with code. And this improves my PRDs, my MVPs an…

If you can't read code and don't understand the codebase, you have no business anywhere near a text editor. I work with a PM that's also learning to program. I assume just like you, they probably feel they'll otherwise will be pushed out. While it's far from the most productive thing I could be doing, I'm always happy to answer questions from a beginner programmer, or walk them through how something works, or how it…

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