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How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

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Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#201

Post by tome »

fogetti wrote: post #141
gretch wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked 6 years as a PM, last 4 at FANG Here's some advice, which you are free to take or to leave, (and that's very reasonable since my advice is generic and I can't speak to your exact circumstances) 1) Just start doing it. Don't wait for someone to give you permission to prioritize customer needs. Pick up the phone and call them. Go to a store and watch them shop for your product. Talk to people. When you set…

I'd be cautious about this advice. Many times even though the company in general might be a feature factory [0], there might very well be a human who actually meets customers, or at least tried meeting them and failed for some reason. So a much better and safer idea might be first to figure if there were any attempts in the past, or is there any ongoing similar initiative right now, find the participants if there was…

> By the way if all the PMs at FAANG are like you ...

This comment doesn't seem necessary!

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#202

Post by rosstex »

worriedformyjob wrote: post #13

Obviously using a throwaway here. Our board members got it into their heads that successful companies must have an AI "play", so they instructed the CEO to invest about 10% of our development budget on AI. We are doing absolutely inane projects that have no hope of succeeding. We serve a niche industry where certified professionals have to do certain tasks personally, instead of being able to delegate to secretaries.…

IBM?

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#203

Post by fogetti »

tome wrote: post #201
fogetti wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be cautious about this advice. Many times even though the company in general might be a feature factory [0], there might very well be a human who actually meets customers, or at least tried meeting them and failed for some reason. So a much better and safer idea might be first to figure if there were any attempts in the past, or is there any ongoing similar initiative right now, find the participants if there was…

> By the way if all the PMs at FAANG are like you ... This comment doesn't seem necessary!

And lo and behold, still it is there

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#204

Post by saberdancer »

robocat wrote: post #30
nurettin wrote: post #4

> Don't just build Something™, build an industry leading product that customers want and love! The point of writing software is to get paid. If the process leads to something actually useful, good on you. If not, you still got paid. It was just a drill, life continues.

That advice is OKish if you only ever want to be a mediocre employee clocking in to get your wages. I think you need to be far more proactive in training your mind if you want to become a founder [edit: of a successful business], or move into more responsible roles, or even just to get satisfaction from shipping great software.

One of the major benefits to having a less invested attitude is that you are not as annoyed or disappointed when things don't work out. In the end, most of us do not have a stake in the product we are building and the success of the product has only minor effect on the developer, by understanding it's a job and not life you will be happier overall if the project does not succeed.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#205

Post by Gene_Parmesan »

coredog64 wrote: post #145
tootie wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha. CTO at my last place did something similar. He hired an AI/ML team. I asked him what projects he had in mind and he said once the team was on board they'd find things to do. He also said we needed a voice app because he read an article about the size of the market. I quit before seeing how any of that worked out.

Previous employer did something similar. Hired a crazy expensive data scientist, spent truckloads of money on a data swamp, er, lake, and then didn’t really have any goals for what to do with all that capacity. The new hire got lucky, as there was some low hanging fruit (optimizations we all knew about). The obvious solution was implemented and then he ex post facto claimed 100% credit for the revenue enhancement. Si…

Yeah my fairly small non-profit recently hired someone with a math degree to do stats and "big data analysis." We are talking about a company with In my experience, to these people, big data means "the excels look really big."

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#206

Post by itronitron »

fxtentacle wrote: post #183
malux85 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I thought this exactly. If he had any brains he’d negotiate with management a 5x bonus for solving it, tied to achieving the 10x optimisations I did this several times in my early career and was paid a lot and it was win/win You have to phrase it carefully, but if you phrase it as a win/win with no risk, they’ll sign off on it

I had a similar situation, but it didn't go through. I offered to reduce the company-wide monthly costs by 5% in exchange for 40k once by replacing an outside vendor with my own self-developed clone which the company would then own. Didn't go through because our investors feared an increased dependency on me as an employee.

funny how in any other type of relationship that increased dependency would be considered a strength and not a risk

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#207

Post by TomMarius »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #99
reading-at-work wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we all know the project will fail unless someone develops well-perfoming, human-level AGI before Q4/2020 This is hilarious, and makes me wonder how many similar corporate AI initiatives are under way in the world right now.

Dude I see hilariously absurd ideas for AI implementation in both the film and podcast worlds. There is definitely potential - such as transcriptions - but people are way overselling the efficacy and trying to “disrupt” with AI in ways no industry professional is asking for.

Isn't that a given when you're disrupting the industry itself? Of course not every idea is good.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#208

Post by Kunigaikstis »

FreeRadical wrote: post #189
Kunigaikstis wrote: post #184

For a couple of years now, I've been developing features for a product that hasn't found product-market fit. Features that nobody _really_ gives a shit about. I can talk directly to one of the cofounders, bring them evidence based on analytics or the past failings of the giants upon whose shoulders we're standing on. His response is, majority of the time, "yeah, I get that. We promised this to a few customers and I r…

You need to ask him to define success and failure for the feature. Under what conditions will he accept it has not worked

It's an iterative process. Our conversations have gotten better over the years. He has the connections and market knowledge so I have to respect his wishes most of the time. I make it sound bad but it's because I'm, like many of us, tired.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#209

Post by bowlich »

nurettin wrote: post #4

> Don't just build Something™, build an industry leading product that customers want and love! The point of writing software is to get paid. If the process leads to something actually useful, good on you. If not, you still got paid. It was just a drill, life continues.

Except when management finally wises up and realizes the product has no future... neither do you.

Much better to look around and find the product/project that is actually going to spawn revenue for the company and get on that team. When layoffs come, you've a much better chance of weathering the storm.*

* No guarantee that management won't do something stupid and lay off the golden egg under some stubborn belief the money sink will someday take off.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#210

Post by blauditore »

dkersten wrote: post #188
worriedformyjob wrote: post #13

Obviously using a throwaway here. Our board members got it into their heads that successful companies must have an AI "play", so they instructed the CEO to invest about 10% of our development budget on AI. We are doing absolutely inane projects that have no hope of succeeding. We serve a niche industry where certified professionals have to do certain tasks personally, instead of being able to delegate to secretaries.…

In my own experience, often non-technical people will attribute things as AI that we wouldn’t, eg any basic automation. Really anything that’s in any way intelligent or seems that way. I had a project where people were excited about a feature that was basically just alerting when one value crossed over or under another... I wonder if your team could provide real value to customers providing some smart “AI” feature th…

The line of were AI starts is not well-defined. If you think about it, virtually all software can be considered AI if you put expectations low enough. From the other end, one could argue that once you understand the inner workings of a piece of AI, it just becomes a fancy algorithm to you. In the end, everything is just a piece of software converting input to output.

My experience is that people tend to consider things AI whenever it feels like "magic" to them, at least in non-technical circles.

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