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Exactly this. I think we lost so much because we allowed people who dont know how to reduce brightness on their monitor to "own" anything in the software dev process. Now they are teaching us that engineering leads should "negotiate" with POs about technical improvements, and how we can best frame it. Excuse me, but what the f? What we call POs now, used to be Business Analysts - valuable contributors for sure, but not "owning" anything. And we made it a big point if an element is 2px farther to the right than the designer foresaw. Not to mention that the agilistas have managed to create cohorts of bootcamp-type-coders whose main concern now is a "well written ticket". Never thinking or heaven forbid, caring about the whole project. I am generally critical towards the enthusiastic usage of LLM tools, but I do think they will have a positive effect of a lot of people not belonging to tech, leaving it.

There used to be subject matter experts, and business analysts. Then companies combined those roles into PMs. I think the biggest problem with that is adding the name Manager to the title and allowing them to “own” the product as opposed to the way it originally worked where it was more collaborative and if anyone owned the product it was engineering.

When I took software engineering classes in school, talking to customers and subject matter experts and figuring out what they wanted was a core part of what we covered.

All these extra layers really are just an absurdity. You hit the nail on the head with your point about de-risking. It seems companies would rather hire 10x the people and spend 10x the money for a 75% chance at producing something mediocre than taking a shot at making something great.

To some extent you can go work for startups to reduce your exposure to this kind of environment, but these days any startup with more than 5 employees thinks they need a PM.

Don’t get me started on UX designers. I’ve taken rigorous HCI classes in grad school. It’s a real academic discipline with tons of theory behind it.

What most UX designers are doing now isn’t close to that. What happened is that number of print design jobs collapsed, and everyone who had a basic understanding of design principles decided to call themselves a UX/UI designer.

So now in many companies you have entire teams of PMs and designers who have next to no engineering understanding designing features and systems before anyone who actually knows how to build the thing even hears about it.

My long term plan is to find some small niche where performance, correctness, and reliability are highly valued and build something that a modern software factory or a VC backed startup with a move fast and break things attitude can’t compete with.

My suspicion is that what I’m looking for is a very small slice of the customer base of an existing very boring piece of business software.

I’ve found engineers, those that care about front end design anyway, to be better UX designers than supposed UX designers. Which makes sense as you’re integrating the design into an overall system and need to understand the implications in a deep way. Most UX designers can’t seem to think past the screen in front of them or even visualize anything but the narrow happy path. Unfortunately we’re training new engineers into this stupid corporate hierarchy where all decision making is taken away from engineers. I had to push junior engineers to speak up when they saw something as every signal to them is to stay on your lane.

> What happened is that number of print design jobs collapsed, and everyone who had a basic understanding of design principles decided to call themselves a UX/UI designer.

Absolutely. Graphic designer != UX professional. A background in graphic design is often negatively correlated with making logical and ease to use interfaces.

I had been very lucky in having a lot of say in design in my career. I worked with great designers who listened and could adapt their designs from feedback. That is until the last five years working at a larger tech company, especially the last three with this BS corporate layoff pressure. This is when I started getting side eye for pushing back on the design team for ignoring standard HID guidelines. I’ve seen some of the worst design output out of these folks. Like they gave zero thought to the general navigation or anything but the happy path. Issues one can identify in seconds from reviewing the design. And the politics are strong where people think you have no right to step outside your little engineering bubble and question these things. Of course that didn’t stop product owners and designers from stepping into your engineering bubble and trashing the place.

Software development was better before computer science became the most popular major, because only people who loved programming could possibly stand the weird awfulness of CS classes. Now kids who’d’ve been business majors in the 90s are flooding our ranks. It’s a different thing.

lol I was an English major

Every place I've worked at in my 30 year career has had product managers in practice. They rarely had that as their title. The most common title for that role has been "CEO", since I've mostly worked in small companies. Some have had extensive engineering experience, some didn't. Some were actually working on the product, some weren't.

The best had a good rapport with both customers and engineers. Engineering experience helped gain this, but I've seen good ones without a lot of engineering experience. But I've never seen a good one without any engineering experience.

The problem isn’t that a single CEO exists who is ultimately making the final decision.

The problem is when companies try to create scores of “mini CEOs” (this is actually how PMs were explained when they started popping up) to oversee every aspect of every product.

A CEO of any but the smallest companies will have many other responsibilities, so they’ll have no choice but to delegate the majority of the decision making to the people actually building the product.

A PM running the search feature or the user onboarding experience or the notification system doesn’t have this limitation.

Also don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked with some fantastic PMs, but they were fantastic despite the role not because of it. Every good PM I’ve ever worked with had the capacity to be a good engineer even if they didn’t have the experience.

I've worked with bad PM's who were good engineers and good PM's who were mediocre engineers.

Because this was written by an LLM

That too…

> I didn’t meet the first full-time designer in my career until 2013.

You mean a UI designer?