Meta, and other large companies have been encouraging PMs to code, while I've seen many negative responses from engineers having to code review, debug, deal with production issues, etc. stemming from crappy code they don't understand. Metrics and KPIs are being gamed into stupid incentives like lines of code, commits, and tickets closed. Leadership claims they are aware of Goodhart's Law, but their actions show otherwise.
Overall the rise of business types in tech company leadership has led to a drop in engineering quality, a rise in short term metrics, and fiascos like the COVID overhiring into multiple rounds of layoffs.
Funny story: I work at Meta and posted a version of this internally in response the bizarre pressure and support for PMs landing prod diffs (the response was very positive FWIW).
which workplace group did you post it to?
I don't remember the exact name, but the one about AI productivity. It should be trivial to find my name from my handle, so just look at my profile.
I don’t think this is a spicy take at all. A PM’s job is to prioritise, and the most important/high priority projects will naturally be handled by Engineers enabled with AI-coding workflows. The high priority/impact work should be allocated to the folks with the highest level of skill.
I feel like PMs coding unlocks a whole new category of work, mainly addressing the long tail of cool ideas/small optimisations that ordinarily would not be addressed. Time will tell how valuable these items are in the long term.
I noticed that AI evangelists really love to use word "fun" to describe anything they do with AI.
Claw people particularly seem really love to use that word when answering what practical or useful they do with AI agents. It's always something absurdly trivial followed by "and it's just fun!"
Don't really have any conclusion to this - just thought to share this observation.
Weird take. Coding is fun (and has been since before AI). And vibe coding is fun in an entirely different way.
What's weird about it? I'm not disputing that it might be fun for vibe coders. Just that they seem to really like using that particular word.
I love coding and it is fun for me. Vibe coding on the other hand - not fun at all. It feels to me like playing slots.
But then again, I never liked gambling.
Not weird at all. It's a common motte & bailey tactic, when your defence of the utility of something fails you can just say you do it for fun!!!!!!!.
I remember this post. But I'm not sure what the future really entails and I suspect it'll be very company/culture dependent. In some companies, the engineers are very savvy and understand the business well. In others, it's the designers. Or sales. Ops. And of course Product Managers. You get the picture.
Whoever gets the business best (and in detail) will likely be the best builders. It's "intuition as evals" that really matters in the end. You think Software Engineers or Product Managers are replacing Quants at trading shops anytime soon? Nope.
The linked article on evals is even more interesting.
Thanks! I posted that one almost a year ago and it blew up on LinkedIn of all places but was totally ignored on HN.
My hot take: the dedicated PM role is becoming optional. Engineers already understand feasibility and tradeoffs, and they often end up informing the PM anyway, which usually comes at the cost of meetings and slow decisions. With clear quarterly goals, engineering and design can own product together. They would shape scope, ship in increments, measure, and iterate. So the "product" function still exists, but its not a separate PM attached to it.
I totally agree (as a PM of ~10 years).
I think that all PMs will need to get onto the engineering, design, or research ladder. We are already seeing companies eliminate the function here and there and I expect the trend to continue.
Hot take: only PMs need to code now. With Claude 4.6 Opus, the engineer skill set is no longer useful. Why are we hiring people with code writing ability when code writing ability has no value anymore?
The general point is that separating PM and eng doesn't make sense any longer. Which subsumes which is an interesting debate.
Your argument that 4.6 Opus makes the engineering skill set useless is totally false and maybe shows you haven't built anything complicated, but it is possible that Opus 5.2 will get there.
I think technical PMs or product oriented developers are the future most valuable people.
You make a better product if you plan it out first. That’s part of a PM’s job so it’s natural fit when the ai does the coding. The code may not be ideal but it’ll have the structure you can improve on.
Entire product or a feature for a product? Sometimes you just want to test an idea and vibe coding works well for that in the very short amount of time it takes now. Product market fit, user testing, engineering, those can come after the hunch.
PMs in Meta-scale companies vs. startups has always been different, and they are diverging even more as AI gets better.
In startups anything goes. PMs and engs do whatever it takes to ship and scale the business. No one cares who's using AI in what way, as long as they're getting shit done.
In a place like Meta or Amazon, people also get more shit done with AI, but because these teams are huge, well-oiled machines, sudden productivity bumps or norm changes can drop overall productivity.
Totally agree with this post as long as it's limited to large, mature teams
100%. PMs at startups already wear many hats and AI helps them do that even better.
But to this sister comment's point, I do think that the dedicated PM role will vanish and the classic BigCo PM will need to look a lot more like the startup one.
Meta, and other large companies have been encouraging PMs to code, while I've seen many negative responses from engineers having to code review, debug, deal with production issues, etc. stemming from crappy code they don't understand. Metrics and KPIs are being gamed into stupid incentives like lines of code, commits, and tickets closed. Leadership claims they are aware of Goodhart's Law, but their actions show otherwise.
Overall the rise of business types in tech company leadership has led to a drop in engineering quality, a rise in short term metrics, and fiascos like the COVID overhiring into multiple rounds of layoffs.
Funny story: I work at Meta and posted a version of this internally in response the bizarre pressure and support for PMs landing prod diffs (the response was very positive FWIW).
which workplace group did you post it to?
I don't remember the exact name, but the one about AI productivity. It should be trivial to find my name from my handle, so just look at my profile.
I don’t think this is a spicy take at all. A PM’s job is to prioritise, and the most important/high priority projects will naturally be handled by Engineers enabled with AI-coding workflows. The high priority/impact work should be allocated to the folks with the highest level of skill.
I feel like PMs coding unlocks a whole new category of work, mainly addressing the long tail of cool ideas/small optimisations that ordinarily would not be addressed. Time will tell how valuable these items are in the long term.
And I say this as a PM.
You'd be surprised. See this sister comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47242372
> Fun!!!!!
I noticed that AI evangelists really love to use word "fun" to describe anything they do with AI.
Claw people particularly seem really love to use that word when answering what practical or useful they do with AI agents. It's always something absurdly trivial followed by "and it's just fun!"
Don't really have any conclusion to this - just thought to share this observation.
Weird take. Coding is fun (and has been since before AI). And vibe coding is fun in an entirely different way.
What's weird about it? I'm not disputing that it might be fun for vibe coders. Just that they seem to really like using that particular word.
I love coding and it is fun for me. Vibe coding on the other hand - not fun at all. It feels to me like playing slots.
But then again, I never liked gambling.
Not weird at all. It's a common motte & bailey tactic, when your defence of the utility of something fails you can just say you do it for fun!!!!!!!.
I remember this post. But I'm not sure what the future really entails and I suspect it'll be very company/culture dependent. In some companies, the engineers are very savvy and understand the business well. In others, it's the designers. Or sales. Ops. And of course Product Managers. You get the picture.
Whoever gets the business best (and in detail) will likely be the best builders. It's "intuition as evals" that really matters in the end. You think Software Engineers or Product Managers are replacing Quants at trading shops anytime soon? Nope.
The linked article on evals is even more interesting.
Thanks! I posted that one almost a year ago and it blew up on LinkedIn of all places but was totally ignored on HN.
My hot take: the dedicated PM role is becoming optional. Engineers already understand feasibility and tradeoffs, and they often end up informing the PM anyway, which usually comes at the cost of meetings and slow decisions. With clear quarterly goals, engineering and design can own product together. They would shape scope, ship in increments, measure, and iterate. So the "product" function still exists, but its not a separate PM attached to it.
I totally agree (as a PM of ~10 years).
I think that all PMs will need to get onto the engineering, design, or research ladder. We are already seeing companies eliminate the function here and there and I expect the trend to continue.
Hot take: only PMs need to code now. With Claude 4.6 Opus, the engineer skill set is no longer useful. Why are we hiring people with code writing ability when code writing ability has no value anymore?
This is kind of like the reverse of the sister comment, which I agree with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47242699
The general point is that separating PM and eng doesn't make sense any longer. Which subsumes which is an interesting debate.
Your argument that 4.6 Opus makes the engineering skill set useless is totally false and maybe shows you haven't built anything complicated, but it is possible that Opus 5.2 will get there.
I think technical PMs or product oriented developers are the future most valuable people.
You make a better product if you plan it out first. That’s part of a PM’s job so it’s natural fit when the ai does the coding. The code may not be ideal but it’ll have the structure you can improve on.
Entire product or a feature for a product? Sometimes you just want to test an idea and vibe coding works well for that in the very short amount of time it takes now. Product market fit, user testing, engineering, those can come after the hunch.
PMs in Meta-scale companies vs. startups has always been different, and they are diverging even more as AI gets better.
In startups anything goes. PMs and engs do whatever it takes to ship and scale the business. No one cares who's using AI in what way, as long as they're getting shit done.
In a place like Meta or Amazon, people also get more shit done with AI, but because these teams are huge, well-oiled machines, sudden productivity bumps or norm changes can drop overall productivity.
Totally agree with this post as long as it's limited to large, mature teams
100%. PMs at startups already wear many hats and AI helps them do that even better.
But to this sister comment's point, I do think that the dedicated PM role will vanish and the classic BigCo PM will need to look a lot more like the startup one.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47242699
> Why should PMs code? Better communicate the idea/feature
I think this is the main takeaway, but I'm curious how bad the PM must have been at communicating to begin with if this is necessary.
Communicating a feature with a doc or mock can be really hard. A prototype can make things much clearer to a broad audience.