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.
Those not on rota can either join or have their PR receive heavy scrutiny
Yesterday I had an interview, but I got rejected. They decided to go for a manager with a Claude subscription who vibe-coded a weather app.
This is the end of software engineering.
Again, that is literally OpenAI's business model: burn money building ChatGPT until it's smart enough to tell them how to be profitable.
"That's a bold strategy, Cotton, let's see if it pays off for 'em."
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.
The key issue right now is that the models falter in the last mile, and the last mile is where you need the training and experience to make sure the thing that lands is production quality.
At some point in the next few years I believe the roles will merge. I suspect that PMs will be forced to specialize towards a discipline (design, data science, engineering, etc.) while engineers will also start to see more of their responsibilities covering former PM territory. Most engineers will probably become closer to “product engineers”.
There’s another path for PMs that the article and most of the comments don’t seem to mention.
Technical PMs are now in a great position to start their own companies. In the past, many were blocked or handicapped by the inability to code. With AI-assisted development, that barrier is much lower, which gives them a lot more leverage to build products themselves.
But that’s far too much work and context switching for one person. Someone will try, but the reason you tend to build teams of specialists is to let people focus even when they can do lots of different things.
Without a PM: I conducted customer interviews, wrote up product requirement docs (PRD), and iterated with design on the mocks. On top of that, I had to implement the whole feature (while tweaking things with a designer), and also juggling another track of technical work.
This would be fine if I was a founding engineer, but I'm not and wasn't being compensated enough for the extra workload. And sure, now with LLMs the coding portion would be smaller, but there would still a lot of context switching and one might not able to do technical deep dives into things with all the meetings. All those meetings.
So don't overlook your PM.
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.
A PM is not optional when you want to have developers that have time to code and don't get distracted by thirty people that all want something else and all ASAP.
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 most recent models have spooked me into believing this is a thing that is likely to be true at some point, but it ain't true yet.
Coding was never the most valuable skill a software engineer contributed. Socially-capable engineers are going to be far more likely than PMs to 'shine' when agents can write code and engineers are afforded more time to engage with busines/customers/stakeholder/domain experts.
If my experience is any reflection of the norm, the avg PMs greatest value has never come from effectively determining the value or requirement of a product or translating requests/feedback to meaningful deliverables. It's been in providing cover (time) for engineers that could do the same job better, but are irreplaceable in the development process and so are more rare/valuable spending time doing development. When engineers no longer need to write code, they are a more direct line to effectively solving "Product-Led" business needs with technical solutions than a typical PM will be.
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.
Just wait what you pay for the tokens when the enshittification has started and the bubble bursted. In some years you will see that no new engineers are coming along and your products are dying on edge cases that the AI can't handle all together.
Edit: Ok, don't got the sarcasm :D
Is this sarcasm? You don't think there is any utility to understanding code?
Edit: you got me haha.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.