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My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

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Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#151

Post by sensanaty »

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…

What use is earning all that extra cash if you're working yourself to death with no way to enjoy the money? I work in a large international org and despite the people in the US earning a lot more than their EU counterparts, they also pretty much universally seem more miserable, are working all sorts of odd hours, have basically no holidays (the amount of times I've gotten a "Vacation again!?" questions from people in the US is insane to me), have to stress more about doctors visits and stuff like that.

I've had a lot of opportunities to be earning a lot more than I do now by moving to the US, but seeing the state of the US I'm more than happy with my 32 hour contract and 5 weeks of vacations that I get to actually enjoy.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#152

Post by youknownothing »

Hype will come down once scalability problems start to show up. It's the same with every new technology: people get excited from the results of their PoC not realising that a PoC is smaller in scope and therefore has better chances of working. Then you try to translate that to a proper project and it all falls apart.

Agentic coding will accelerate things, but you'll still need the engineers.

Power tools didn't get rid of the tradespeople, they just made the ones that knew how to use the more efficient.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#153

Post by AlexandrB »

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…

Scrum is management consulting companies trying to keep their job by turning something that would make them irrelevant (the agile manifesto) into something that requires tons of billable hours and useless qualifications like "scrum master". Seems to be working great for them.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#154

Post by veggieroll »

ef2k wrote: post #14

My hot take: the dedicated PM role is becoming optional. Engineers already understand feasibility and tradeoffs, and they often end up informing the PM anyway, which usually comes at the cost of meetings and slow decisions. With clear quarterly goals, engineering and design can own product together. They would shape scope, ship in increments, measure, and iterate. So the "product" function still exists, but its not a…

> With clear quarterly goals

This requires a quality of product/program management and upper management buy-in that is rare in my experience.

The dynamic I've experienced is upper management giving the same incompetent teams projects over and over, having month after month of meetings with no deliveries and no real progress on the deliverable, and then eventually having to scramble and find someone else who can actually accomplish their goals.

Either that or so many things are broken that there's no possible way to prioritize beyond a few weeks because you can't let attention dip from any one spinning plate for too long or it'll fall.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#155

Post by munchbunny »

fhd2 wrote: post #63
munchbunny wrote: post #27

I generally agree with the take. At the moment the models and agents aren’t good enough for someone who isn’t trained to build and maintain a production system. So as long as Eng isn’t significantly more bandwidth starved than PM, PM’s writing production code is not a high leverage activity. The key issue right now is that the models falter in the last mile, and the last mile is where you need the training and experi…

Which would be pretty much full circle at that point. When I started out, it was common for developers to do "product management", there wasn't a specialised role for it yet. You had developers and maybe project managers (generally also developers) and testers, and that was about it. Management would talk to developers about their strategy and problems, and they'd figure out what to build based on that. I'm pretty we…

> If they're good at whatever it is they end up doing, that's good.

As a former PM (now an engineer), I think that's pretty much it. Teams and companies will vary a lot in terms of what they want the PM's to do, with some common patterns emerging, but as long as the PM's do the work well then the team is much better off. The key issue is how much you can trust the PM to hold up their end of the project.

A common theme I've noticed among good PM's: good judgement. When the team can trust the PM's judgement, the whole team flows better. When the team can't trust the PM's judgement, the PM is worth negative bandwidth.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#156

Post by dragonwriter »

joe_mamba wrote: post #137
titanomachy wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Isn't social security a thing?

Social Security alone will, at best, slightly mitigate poverty. 401Ks are generally employee-funded, with some firms providing matching funds, especially during good economic times and where the firm is in a field where the main area of labor relied on relatively scarce so that there is competition for talent.

EDIT: The line about social security is a little inaccurate in the extreme case; its actually technically possible to reach a moderate income ($62k/year) on Social Security, if you have a long enough working career (35 years or more) earning at the maximum taxed wages for Social Security (currently $185k+) and claim at or beyond the age that maximizes the benefit calculation (70 years).

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#158

Post by steve1977 »

justonceokay wrote: post #146
carschno wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are various technical corrections, with arguable pros and cons. However, they do not match the underlying problem stated above: > the rise of business types in tech company leadership

The fact that they are PMs is a tragedy of circumstance, not a moral failing. If they are willing to go on-call for their work they will lose that childlike innocence and become engineers very quickly.

> they will lose that childlike innocence and become engineers very quickly.

I don't think so. Not everyone has an engineer mindset (or a PM mindset, for that matter). There's a reason these people ended up where they ended up.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#159

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

AlexandrB wrote: post #153
ramon156 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Scrum is management consulting companies trying to keep their job by turning something that would make them irrelevant (the agile manifesto) into something that requires tons of billable hours and useless qualifications like "scrum master". Seems to be working great for them.

The agile manifesto is about how to run a consulting company. "Customer collaboration over contract negotiation" is not something non-contracting software teams have to worry about, customer collaboration is important but there's no contract negotiation to prioritize it over.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#160

Post by xantronix »

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 cannot tell if this is a genuine sentiment or parody; in this space, the two coincide with one another so frequently these days that it's hard to tell.

Please don't give up. This too shall pass. The bill for the worst excesses in this great experiment will come due. I can imagine the need to reckon with the growing technical and cognitive debt in a responsible way will be an existential issue for some enterprises. Somebody will need to step in and be the adults in the room.

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