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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

#191

Post by theshrike79 »

650 wrote: post #6

Meta, and other large companies have been encouraging PMs to code, while I've seen many negative responses from engineers having to code review, debug, deal with production issues, etc. stemming from crappy code they don't understand. Metrics and KPIs are being gamed into stupid incentives like lines of code, commits, and tickets closed. Leadership claims they are aware of Goodhart's Law, but their actions show other…

We're solving this with two different tracks for Vibed stuff and Actual Code.

Vibed stuff can do whatever it wants, with some basic CI checks and Agent instructions

BUT if any of that crosses specific thresholds (writes to dangerous APIs, reads from unvetted sources, is deployed on the public internet), an actual developer MUST review the code - with the associated costs billed to the creator's BU.

Works fine, zero projects have been made public yet, but we have a bunch of Vibed internal tools in use that can't be accessed outside our internal network (or VPN) that are actually helping people do their work more efficiently.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#192

Post by adampunk »

dasil003 wrote: post #56

As much as I recognize that a truly talented product manager is worth their weight in gold, I'd say the average engineer would be much more capable of learning to be an average PM than vice versa. PM vibe coding a prototype for demonstration purposes? Might be a better use of a designer or engineers time, but okay I could see it being valuable. PM vibe coding something to ship to production? Your title is now enginee…

>I'd say the average engineer would be much more capable of learning to be an average PM than vice versa.

software engineers love to imagine that they have the only job you can't train yourself to do quickly, all evidence to the contrary.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#193

Post by dasil003 »

bennyelv wrote: post #165
dasil003 wrote: post #56

As much as I recognize that a truly talented product manager is worth their weight in gold, I'd say the average engineer would be much more capable of learning to be an average PM than vice versa. PM vibe coding a prototype for demonstration purposes? Might be a better use of a designer or engineers time, but okay I could see it being valuable. PM vibe coding something to ship to production? Your title is now enginee…

I imagine you’re saying that as a software engineer :). As a manager of both software engineers and product managers, I think this view is a bit of a stretch. Some software engineers would make good product managers, some product managers would make good software engineers, and the majority of both are best suited to their current job.

You're correct I've spent most time as a software engineer or a engineering manager. I actually started my career as a web designer though. I've also been effectively an active PM in roles where there was no formal product management funtion. I've also been a co-founder of a two person operation where I did all the product and tech, and my co-founder did all the biz and operations. Another startup I co-founded I was "CTO" but was effectively the number 2 in a 100 person company and had veto power over our first PM hire. I've also been part of a larger scaleup that was acquired in a scenario that left a number of folks orphaned, so for a while I was also managing a handful of designers, program managers, and an IT manager.

So yeah, I understand your point, and if I ran a cross-functional team like that I would hopefully hire well enough that I felt the same. So maybe to restate my thinking in a way that may be slightly less controversial: AI is eating a lot of the low-level mechanistic work that used to define being a software engineer, however I never believed that was where the value was for engineers anyway. While some PMs are incredible and would no doubt be able to get good at vibe coding, the majority in my 25 years experience do not have the patience to get to a precision of requirements which is absolutely still a requirement to get anything out of AI.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#194

Post by dasil003 »

adampunk wrote: post #192
dasil003 wrote: post #56

As much as I recognize that a truly talented product manager is worth their weight in gold, I'd say the average engineer would be much more capable of learning to be an average PM than vice versa. PM vibe coding a prototype for demonstration purposes? Might be a better use of a designer or engineers time, but okay I could see it being valuable. PM vibe coding something to ship to production? Your title is now enginee…

>I'd say the average engineer would be much more capable of learning to be an average PM than vice versa. software engineers love to imagine that they have the only job you can't train yourself to do quickly, all evidence to the contrary.

I don't know how that relates to what I said, and it's certainly not something I believe. Personally I don't think any form of knowledge work can be learned quickly in 21st century, otherwise it would have been automated away already (well before the current wave of AI that further accelerates the trend). That goes for product management, design, operations, strategy equally to software engineering, data science any other technical disciplines.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#195

Post by adampunk »

dasil003 wrote: post #194
adampunk wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'd say the average engineer would be much more capable of learning to be an average PM than vice versa. software engineers love to imagine that they have the only job you can't train yourself to do quickly, all evidence to the contrary.

I don't know how that relates to what I said, and it's certainly not something I believe. Personally I don't think any form of knowledge work can be learned quickly in 21st century, otherwise it would have been automated away already (well before the current wave of AI that further accelerates the trend). That goes for product management, design, operations, strategy equally to software engineering, data science any…

It relates directly to what you said. You said you thought that it would be pretty easy to teach an engineer to be a project manager and pretty hard to teach a project manager to be an engineer. That is just exactly the kind of directionality I pointed out.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#196

Post by dasil003 »

adampunk wrote: post #195
dasil003 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how that relates to what I said, and it's certainly not something I believe. Personally I don't think any form of knowledge work can be learned quickly in 21st century, otherwise it would have been automated away already (well before the current wave of AI that further accelerates the trend). That goes for product management, design, operations, strategy equally to software engineering, data science any…

It relates directly to what you said. You said you thought that it would be pretty easy to teach an engineer to be a project manager and pretty hard to teach a project manager to be an engineer. That is just exactly the kind of directionality I pointed out.

You're putting words in my mouth. Also, I was talking about Product Managers, there's a word of different between that role and Project Manager (or Program Manager).

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#197

Post by gzread »

sensanaty wrote: post #151
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…

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…

I've heard of an American senior executive who was assigned to an Australian office and at first thought everyone was lazy but then after actually working there for a while he was sad to have to go back.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#200

Post by maplethorpe »

robotswantdata wrote: post #57
maplethorpe wrote: post #21

Hot take: only PMs need to code now. With Claude 4.6 Opus, the engineer skill set is no longer useful. Why are we hiring people with code writing ability when code writing ability has no value anymore?

If that were true, why would they need a PM ether? Agents would research and identify requirements on their own, observe customer interactions and monitor for trends. Taste.md downloaded via LoveFrom

A PM's job isn't the same as coding. It's a lot more than just writing words.
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