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

141–150 of 155 posts

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

#141

Post by icedchai »

crazygringo wrote: post #89
gregorygoc wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deeply flawed analogy. Engineers operate in the same organizational structure as PMs. Also, in product feature teams it is up to the debate whether PMs provide any value, if you put engineers closer to customers. For the PM role to work, they need to convey customer requirements to product requirements. I have never seen a PM do a better job at this in comparison to just sending a TL to a video call with a client.

> Engineers operate in the same organizational structure as PMs. I don't know what this means. Engineers are not generally spending half their time talking to management, marketing, sales, customers, and other stakeholders. > Also, in product feature teams it is up to the debate whether PMs provide any value, if you put engineers closer to customers. For the PM role to work, they need to convey customer requirements…

Exactly that. Generally, engineers want to build and not go to meetings all day. The problem happens with the PMs who are supposed to be doing this work don't do it, or do it poorly. You wind up with miscommunications: missing requirements, misunderstood edge cases, etc. This pisses people off big time.

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

#142

Post by nitwit005 »

crazygringo wrote: post #29
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 engineerin…

This story feels inconsistent. Where did the backlog come from?

The developers would have to help with the requirements and planning all the code changes. That implies a huge amount of non-coding work was done by the developers.

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

#143

Post by crazygringo »

nitwit005 wrote: post #142
crazygringo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 engineerin…

This story feels inconsistent. Where did the backlog come from? The developers would have to help with the requirements and planning all the code changes. That implies a huge amount of non-coding work was done by the developers.

Inconsistent? It's just my experience at different companies.

The backlog comes from the PM, as user needs are established.

The requirements come from a mix of PM and UX.

Obviously developers plan how to write the code. That's part of coding. Not part of product requirements.

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

#144

Post by nitwit005 »

crazygringo wrote: post #143
nitwit005 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This story feels inconsistent. Where did the backlog come from? The developers would have to help with the requirements and planning all the code changes. That implies a huge amount of non-coding work was done by the developers.

Inconsistent? It's just my experience at different companies. The backlog comes from the PM, as user needs are established. The requirements come from a mix of PM and UX. Obviously developers plan how to write the code. That's part of coding. Not part of product requirements.

Exactly as I suggested, you've tossed non-coding activities into the coding category. Planning is not writing code.

Imagine an architect who never writes a line of code. Under your accounting, they're doing coding, because it's the planning for code.

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

#145

Post by kj4211cash »

crazygringo wrote: post #143
nitwit005 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This story feels inconsistent. Where did the backlog come from? The developers would have to help with the requirements and planning all the code changes. That implies a huge amount of non-coding work was done by the developers.

Inconsistent? It's just my experience at different companies. The backlog comes from the PM, as user needs are established. The requirements come from a mix of PM and UX. Obviously developers plan how to write the code. That's part of coding. Not part of product requirements.

I'd hate to work at a place where the backlog comes from the PM and the requirements come from a mix of PM and UX. Do you really think your PMs know that much more than your Engineers, Data Scientists, Ops/Business, etc.? This just sounds like something the type of PMs most of us hate, the type who insist on being the main character, would say.

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

#146

Post by gregorygoc »

crazygringo wrote: post #134
gregorygoc wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any efficiency gains which come from cleaner organization structure are gone because of the lossy translation mechanism between a PM and Eng team. You can argue that good PMs translate requirements perfectly, but this is a rare skill and I’m just saying I’ve never seen it from someone in this role. Perceived enjoyment of one’s role is a separate topic, but not completely orthogonal. If someone just wants to code and…

> You can argue that good PMs translate requirements perfectly, but this is a rare skill and I’m just saying I’ve never seen it You can also argue that good devs translate requirements into code perfectly with zero bugs, but it's also a rare skill and I've never seen that . Because in the real world, nobody's perfect. The good news is you don't need to be perfect to still add lots of value. Demanding a standard of pe…

For the right set of requirements I can fix bugs in my system with significantly less effort, than rewriting a system which was built with wrong assumptions to begin with.

Again, wrong analogy. I don’t demand perfect analogies though. Treat this as rather charitable gesture.

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

#147

Post by DanielHB »

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 had a bad time with PMs and UX designers not actually understanding how the product works _right now_. How can you ask for changes if you don't understand how it works currently?

Like I am saying how the current behavior of the app downright needs a big flowchart to explain and I get asked: "Add X, but keep it working for all existing users" when that means the whole freaking flowcharts needs to be redrawn from scratch. When I suggest to remove some things to make things simpler (because the users don't understand it either) I get denied because it would be too much hassle to communicate the changes.

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

#148

Post by brookst »

bgwalter wrote: post #9
brookst wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing those open source developers learned their craft in isolated rooms, never seeing anyone else’s code. All of culture and technology builds be accreting on top of previous works. I can’t stand the moral outrage from people who are themselves standing on the shoulders of giants.

You can get pretty far with just K&R and in isolation if you write algorithmic code. Or with just APUE in isolation. LLMs cannot, they need vast bodies of stolen text to become remotely useful. For all activities, humans need less training material than the laundromats. Aside from that, there are legal, philosophical and economic arguments that machines are not the same as humans and do not deserve the same rights. 9…

How many human developers have never learned from other peoples’ code?

And let’s at least make up better stats. No way even 50% of the population understands and thinks about the issues. I’d say it’s probably 11.5184% actually.

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

#149

Post by brookst »

LtWorf wrote: post #110
brookst wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing those open source developers learned their craft in isolated rooms, never seeing anyone else’s code. All of culture and technology builds be accreting on top of previous works. I can’t stand the moral outrage from people who are themselves standing on the shoulders of giants.

Humans don't need to read all of the existing code to produce new code. In fact humans invented code into existance.

Clever shift of “humans” meaning individuals in the first sentence, and the category in the second.

Today’s humans who write code positively learned from reading other peoples’ code.

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

#150

Post by crazygringo »

nitwit005 wrote: post #144
crazygringo wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inconsistent? It's just my experience at different companies. The backlog comes from the PM, as user needs are established. The requirements come from a mix of PM and UX. Obviously developers plan how to write the code. That's part of coding. Not part of product requirements.

Exactly as I suggested, you've tossed non-coding activities into the coding category. Planning is not writing code. Imagine an architect who never writes a line of code. Under your accounting, they're doing coding, because it's the planning for code.

You seem to be having a different conversation.

The root comment was about coding vs "design, quality assurance and debugging, art assets, localizations", etc.

Not coding vs planning coding. It's the same way the art department both plans the art and draws it.

Post reply on HN