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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

I think you're conflating "doing two jobs" with "not being allowed to just type JavaScript into a computer all day in isolation and being expected to actually communicate and think about things other than data structures and algorithms."

If you're a true senior software engineer as most of us claim to be coding is a small part of your job, not your entire job.

You should be learning the product through the PM for sure, and I don't think a senior engineer should be doing first-level support, but especially in small companies talking to customers is good and should be expected from basically everyone who is working on the product.

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Let's flip this around and see if it still fits:

"the PM can't be expected to sit in meetings all day, they need to learn the coding side of it too so they know the potential limitations of the features they want to suggest"

But if a PM does have a technical question, they don't need to go google stuff and figure it out - they ask a developer.

Likewise, when a developer has a product question, why can't they rely on a PM to answer that for them? Why must we also be expected to be in customer meetings and putting in extra effort, when PMs definitely won't put in effort to learn the technical side?

Yes, it still fits when you flip it around, speaking as an engineer turned technical PM. PMs should absolutely be technical and have enough depth of understanding about the product they can figure things out for themselves, as well as write code.

That's not going to prevent the PM from asking questions to the developers though. I ask questions all the time, because I want to validate my mental model with others and verify my understanding. Asking questions is a /good/ thing.

The part where you are missing the boat is acting like customers are a distraction or an enemy. Customers are /the point/, the /only/ point, really at the end of the day. Every role in every business is customer-facing to some degree.

> But if a PM does have a technical question, they don't need to go google stuff and figure it out - they ask a developer.

In a good organization they first try to figure it out themselves versus distracting a developer (thus costing possibly hours of productivity due to breaking someone's flow). The same way a developer would first try to answer their own question before they start badgering another developer.

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