More product, fewer product managers • Hacker News Board

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#311

Post by charlie0 » Wed, Dec 20, 2023, 12:29 AM UTC

pitched wrote: post #310

charlie0 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the alternative is for management to be surrounded by "yes" people?

If that wasn’t pretty widely true, would the meme exist?

I mean it is true, but I disagree with your prior comment that people with agency slow things down. It may appear that way, but really, they speed things up and the answer is simple. People with agency scale... a lot. If decision making is centralized, it's like communism, it might work at small scale, but won't past a certain point because the centralized points bottleneck the entire system to the point where it can't operate effectively.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#312

Post by epgui » Wed, Dec 20, 2023, 9:34 PM UTC

demondemidi wrote: post #257

epgui wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politics is what happens when you have limited resources and you need to decide where to allocate them. Politics are everywhere humans are.

But why then is it used as a pejorative? What you described is "engineering".

That's not at all what engineering is. Engineering is the application of science (including mathematics) to solve technical problems and/or optimize processes.

An engineer also has to eat lunch in order to function, but engineering is not the same thing as professional food critiquing.

---

To answer your question, it's pejorative because politics is about allocating resources one way or another, towards and away from particular social groups. It's inherently going to be making some of the people unhappy, 100% of the time. Real life politics also tends to not be done smartly and honestly at all times and in all places, and this can make some people upset as well.

Most people associate all of that together, and most people don't take an academic (or particularly analytical) approach to the subject.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#313

Post by _giorgio_ » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 11:15 AM UTC

rpastuszak wrote: post #44

_giorgio_ wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most sad part is imagining the prompt that he used, and how hard he tried to add black, whites, women... respecting the politically correct numbers.

What would be so sad about it?

Wokeism is sad.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#314

Post by dickersnoodle » Sun, Dec 24, 2023, 10:10 PM UTC

pdimitar wrote: post #273

dickersnoodle wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s like saying you don’t need a qa team because the developers tested it. Strangely enough, that's happening at a few companies (run by Amazon refugees IIRC) where they think that making devs do QA and removing QA/QE roles will speed delivery. I'm in one of those companies now, and I'm waiting for the #FAFO loop to happen.

That really depends on what does QA entail at these companies. If it's just increasing test coverage and adding integration tests then yes, devs should be doing it. If it's just clicking UIs all day long then obviously a QA should do it. Or have an UAT environment where a few more enthusiastic customers are willing to test and report bugs.

It's more than that. In an org with an architecture of silo'd teams that all work on their own independent federated services, you'll need people to test out all of the variations on content, timing and error handling for the software as a whole. Depending on automated testing to handle all of that, in a live environment, is a fool's errand no matter how much it makes the development cycle seem to go faster.