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

businessinsider.com

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

#41

Post by crystal_revenge »

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…

> quality assurance and debugging

This is still part of “coding”. It doesn’t make any sense to say you’ve “finished coding” when the program doesn’t actually work as required.

I’ve been aghast to see developers present an unequivocally broken product and try to argue making it not visibly broken is “scope creep”.

I mean, that’s why we argue so much about the best ways to write code: we want to reduce the incidence of bugs and make it easier to correct unexpected errors.

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

#42

Post by gregorygoc »

bonsai_bar wrote: post #30
crazygringo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I have never met an engineer who actually did the work of driving the engineering vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling data between servers, disks, clients, and CPUs." You seem to have a deep misunderstanding of the value PM's provide. What you describe as "just" is a challenging job. Generally, the vision is set by the founder, and it can be written down in a sentence or two. There's a ton of work trying to t…

Gotta love that SWE arrogance.

What is so arrogant in expressing first-hand experiences?

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

#43

Post by crazygringo »

dietr1ch wrote: post #32
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…

Your "coding team" there isn't actually coding most of the time. Sitting down to type isn't the bottleneck, but the work that needs to happen so you can sit down and type what needs to be typed.

The comparison is with other departments, like QA or localization.

Figuring out libraries, deciding on architectures, researching documentation, that's an integral part of coding.

The topic here is not keystrokes.

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

#44

Post by huflungdung »

bonsai_bar wrote: post #30
crazygringo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I have never met an engineer who actually did the work of driving the engineering vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling data between servers, disks, clients, and CPUs." You seem to have a deep misunderstanding of the value PM's provide. What you describe as "just" is a challenging job. Generally, the vision is set by the founder, and it can be written down in a sentence or two. There's a ton of work trying to t…

Gotta love that SWE arrogance.

[dead]

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

#45

Post by spyckie2 »

betaby wrote: post #38
jsnell wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect somebody could. But why? Do you need a new XML library? I don't. And if you don't need one, why write one? If there is no specific use case in mind, how do you even determine what dimension "good" is measured on?

XML is used extensively everywhere. Multibillion companies depend on libxml2 which historically had multitude of vulnerabilities, see https://ubuntu.com/security/cves?package=libxml2 Most of the Internet ifra depends on libxml2, major vendors like Juniper and Cisco use it. To my knowledge Android use it as well, Naturally, with the advancement of AI, one would expect XML would be first thing to rewrite, given that li…

I mean listen to yourself…

Let’s take a critical piece of infrastructure where if it goes down, billions of things also break.

And have ai rewrite it.

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

#46

Post by bgwalter »

megaloblasto wrote: post #33
J_McQuade wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many people are seeing huge gains in coding productivity with AI. I don't want to speak for the person you replied to, but I think that their main point is... are they? I see lots of articles about huge increases in productivity, but I think it's fair to argue that we've yet to see the huge increases in useful products that would surely (we hope) result from that if it were true.

I'm speaking just to coding productivity. I think AI does very little for business development or creativity type issues. People should realize that denying that AI can boost productivity in coding makes it look like they don't know how to use it, or believe in some conspiracy that no one is actually benefitting and it's all market hype from tech bros.

This is Gavin Belson level stuff.

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

#47

Post by boredtofears »

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…

A fully curated backlog with complete specifications that is kept up to date with current changes in the product/industry? I've never had the privilege of working in an environment like that.

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

#48

Post by Syntaf »

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…

I had a period of time at my last job where the product org was so dysfunctional engineers did in fact run out of work.

Initially I didn’t mind it because my team focused on technical debt, but it pretty quickly turned sour. Having to scrape up “work” for the team of 6 engineers each morning to appear productive to management was dreadful

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

#49

Post by jayd16 »

dcreater wrote: post #26
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…

The PM discipline has unfortunately maldeveloped as a place for souless MBAs, engineering degree holders who dont want to be engineers or both. Actual Product people are a small minority Its a tragedy as its undervalued - I firmly believe apples products are significantly worse if their engineers led it. Jobs made those products

Even the nomenclature is malevolently vague. PM conflates product management with project management and they are not the same.

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

#50

Post by alehlopeh »

betaby wrote: post #38
jsnell wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect somebody could. But why? Do you need a new XML library? I don't. And if you don't need one, why write one? If there is no specific use case in mind, how do you even determine what dimension "good" is measured on?

XML is used extensively everywhere. Multibillion companies depend on libxml2 which historically had multitude of vulnerabilities, see https://ubuntu.com/security/cves?package=libxml2 Most of the Internet ifra depends on libxml2, major vendors like Juniper and Cisco use it. To my knowledge Android use it as well, Naturally, with the advancement of AI, one would expect XML would be first thing to rewrite, given that li…

Your original point would have had a bigger impact if you hadn’t married it to an idiosyncratic affection for XML. Now you’re stuck defending the usefulness of that particular technology which is entirely unrelated to AI.
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