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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

#51

Post by dataflow »

jayd16 wrote: post #49
dcreater wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't forget program management.

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

#52

Post by sitkack »

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

Saying the quiet part out loud. What kind of engineering org outsources this? 80% of engineering is confirming your design works, otherwise it is just LARPing.

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

#53

Post by ozgrakkurt »

damon_c wrote: post #31
betaby wrote: post #10

If AI is that good, can someone code a good XML library with AI? The spec is available. If AI is that good, there should be an explosion of Open Source projects of good quality. Neither of those is happening.

One thing that has changed for me personally is that these days if I’m parsing XML, I might just tell AI to write a parser that can handle these 5 XML files. It might load up a library or it might just roll its own, but one thing that is not going to happen is that I’m not building some beautiful well engineered XML parser which I then open source. I wonder if that is what’s going on?

That sounds worse than using an xml library to parse something

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

#55

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

anikom15 wrote: post #20
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 Mythical Man-Month was written in 1975, and it seems hardly anyone has still bothered to read it.

Yeah, when I read it (probably a decade ago now) it was remarkable how much of the advice was still applicable. If you (yes, you reader) haven't read it before you should do so. It's only 200 pages or so, mostly short articles so it's not a difficult read.

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

#56

Post by jayd16 »

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.

I admit that I don't know how to use it and it does seem like marketing hype and tech bros with some mild value and I'm waiting to be proven wrong and crushed, John Henry the Steel Driving Man style, and it's just not happening.

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

#57

Post by sitkack »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #15

Andrew Ng has had a really sad career trajectory to a point where it's hard to take him seriously anymore. When I started in ML the very first course I took was actually Andrew Ng's course and it was amazingly good. But the past few years whenever he pops up, it always seems to be him repeating the talking points of some AI company that's paying him money. It's like seeing your hero turn into a complete sellout, shov…

You haven't made any quantitative statements. Low effort personal attack.

Who is paying him here?

From your comment, you can't even tell the topic, let alone the actual idea he is putting forth.

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

#58

Post by theptip »

I would endorse this position at very least directionally. The job is going to move up the abstraction stack; one person will do what a 5-person startup did, which means a founder must own more product and sales stuff.

If you like working in software because you enjoy writing code, I predict you’re gonna find it harder to make this pay. (Though leisure coding will likely get more fun, and there will always be niche CS-type roles that require inventing new technical systems.)

If you like software because you enjoy making things that people find valuable or entertaining, then I think you’ll do just fine.

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

#59

Post by LtWorf »

jayd16 wrote: post #49
dcreater wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But what's the difference? Does anyone actually know?

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

#60

Post by ozgrakkurt »

betaby wrote: post #10

If AI is that good, can someone code a good XML library with AI? The spec is available. If AI is that good, there should be an explosion of Open Source projects of good quality. Neither of those is happening.

It is not good, it is for people who can’t write code to delude themselves mostly
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