[ironjunkie]

Not working at Evernote, but that definitely sounds like way too close to home.

The issue with Product Manager, Marketing managers etc is that those people are usually really good at marketing THEMSELVES and creating a mess of internal politics by doing so. They are needed but if you have too many of them pass a certain threshold and the whole company will never recover.

This seems to be unfortunately what is happening at Evernote.

[haywire2018]

Posting anon for obvious reasons.

The Product Managers at our company seem to:

1. Optimize going to lots of conferences which always happen to be at great locations

2. Cant provide more detailed "what did you learn at the conference" responses than useless boilerplate "customers are excited about xyz and there is huge growth there"

3. Create "partnerships" that sounds great with nice press releases but there is almost never any retrospective on how much sales $ these partnerships brought

4. Usually know very little about actual platform constraints and push cool-sounding ideas which incur massive technical debt

5. Love to create one-off demonstrations products that conveniently avoid hard questions about the technical platform and nicely shine to the c-suite and stick the ugliness of technical debt they bring to the engineers

6. Spend most of their day on Linked In hunting for the next sucker company

[sidcool]

Wow. How do such people survive in high pressure workplaces? And doesn't the leadership have any clue?

[kamaal]

Mostly its symbiosis. When you have that much waste in the management layers, there is high degree of mutual political co-operation. This is even more easy in a 'Product Manager' position, you have quite literally no deliverables and almost nothing to report to your immediate manager(Who themselves have no deliverables). Often the thing they have to show are some metrics, which are generated by engineers, even the information that goes into the slides comes from engineers. So they basically 'own' the product, in the sense they get to make go-nogo calls during product launches.

Product managers are also insanely famous for killing features just to assert authority(This apparently comes while trying to appear like Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs said no to features, so we say no.).

The people managers don't put up a fight because they too are probably over staffed. The Managers/Real-Contributor ratio is high, and they know if they open their mouths and protest, their jobs are on the line next. So they let things go on.

A while back 'Program Managers' were in a similar state in most companies. I know places where they fired the entire Program management org and didn't notice any change, not even a faint pain. That was how contribution-less the whole hierarchy was.

The other part is obvious. These companies are full of VC money. They didn't earn it. The founders didn't earn it. Its free. After all its not like a loan you pay back, if the company falters, the founders or anybody of authority doesn't owe a dime to the investors. So they splurge. They spend on people. Most importantly they spend on their friends, who can help them get jobs else where.

[ta564756856]

All people are more susceptible to charismatic others than we'd like to admit I think.

People will tend to believe and trust them more, and so they can spin the narrative however they'd like (and often they're the layer of separation between devs and the higher-level management that precludes the higher-ups even getting first-hand exposure to some issues).

Edit: I also think charismatic others can do this without always knowing it i.e. in a self-interest sort of sense.

[andrei_says_]

You will really enjoy Dan Lyon’s Disrupted. It’s a book which doesn’t pull punches in its description of hubspot.

[brogrammernot]

This isn’t how it should be but damn, it does exist. I switched into a product role after being in engineering after 5 years and it amazes me how many decisions are made without any consideration for the technical implications.

Even with my engineering background (full stack, leaning closer to front-end) I still pair with my engineering team lead for all planning activities for the quarter.

I’m not sure what org/comapny you work for, but in my experience (little over a year) I’ve had engineers tell me I make their lives a lot easier b/c I’m the umbrella that keeps them out of meetings, always dedicate some of the quarter to tech debt, and try to get them involved in early meetings as needed around the larger “moon shot” type of product features.

So maybe n=1, but I’ve also had zero attrition on my team of 10 engineers and hiring has been easier but most engineers haven’t had a product manager who used to be an engineer (I’ll always claim to be one heart) so maybe the issue is lack of technical awareness around the product they’re owning.

[ltbarcly3]

> They are needed but ...

I really don't agree. The person in charge needs to have enough technical insight to have a good sense of the overall health of the team and whether reasonable progress is being made. They also need to have a sense of what is a 'good' product and what about the product needs to be improved.

Lets say the person in charge is not technical. The first thing that will happen is someone will get behind on what they are working on, and they will make some excuse (the database was reindexing or some nonsense), and the boss will believe them. From then on everyone knows they can slack off and get away with it, so productivity drops to almost 0.

Next the boss brings in technical managers to supervise the programmers, because he knows nothing is getting done but he doesn't know enough to call anybody out. This makes things much worse, since each manager is primarily motivated to be promoted, and the best way to be promoted is to demonstrate your ability to manage a large team. To get a larger team managers will deliver everything just a little too slow but hold out the carrot that if they had another person things could get done more quickly. In reality the managers are even less technically capable than the Boss, because they were interviewed and hired by the Boss. Boss's love throwing money at a problem, and team size grows and grows but managers can't actually push the team to get more done because they don't have any idea what is going on. The managers basically don't care about that anyway, since increasing productivity wouldn't help them and they can get favors in return by hiring someone's cousin.

Now there are hundreds of programmers and a dozen managers getting less done than the original 5 programmers. Lots of the programmers are extremely incompetent, hired due to nepotism or by mistake. They will never be fired because the manager would be admitting they made a mistake, or worse they might not get to hire a replacement if they fire this person, and this conflicts with their main goal of increasing their teams size to get a promotion.

Somebody has to plan work for all these programmers, and most of them are incompetent and don't care about the product. As a result, the quality is terrible. When confronted by the obvious bugs, they try to weasel out of it, and the boss is now very busy trying to keep customers and deal with emergencies (the database is down again!) to keep checking for all the obvious problems, so armies of QA people are hired. At some point a product manager is hired and once one is in the building they will hire 5 more within a year. Now you have 6 product managers having meetings with each other literally all day, and having not even a basic idea of what is going on they will start making plans. Since the programmers look busy when they are not seen or heard from so they just hide as much as possible and try not to attract attention, or put on headphones and stare at their monitors. The Product Managers look busy when they are having meetings, so they are always in every meeting, and pretty soon they insinuate themselves as the go betweens since they are always talking to the boss and the programmers are never around. Now the boss has even less idea what is going on since all the information getting to the boss is going through PMs who have literally no understanding of what is going on, and who get almost all of their information from other PMs, who get almost all their information from other PMs.

If this is a small company it is now basically in the same situation as Evernote is in now, and will go out of business soon, and if it's a large company the original boss has made such a mess and wasted so much money that the team he manages is large enough that the boss can get promoted to VP.

OR

The person in charge has enough technical understanding to keep his 10 programmers honest and make reasonable plans and be respected, and he keeps the team size at 10 super productive, happy programmers. If it's a small company he sells it to a big company for a huge pile of money, and if it's at a big company he gets passed over for promotion to VP because the job goes to some idiot that has managed to hire 500 incompetent programmers, 250 QA testers, and 200 PMs.

[coredog64]

For a moment I thought you were describing my employer.

[bob33212]

Exactly. Also, these PMs are likely to act in a way that will get good developers to quit and will not hire someone because they are too competent. I don't think it is always malicious though. They view themselves as a valuable part of software development. So when someone says that micromanaging good developers and putting them in 15 meeting a week is counterproductive, the PM assumes that person is lying or wrong. I MEAN IF NO ONE IS MANAGING THE DEVELOPERS, NOTHING WILL GET DONE.

[justin_vanw]

> I MEAN IF NO ONE IS MANAGING THE DEVELOPERS, NOTHING WILL GET DONE.

What they don't realize is that if you put nontechnical people in charge of programmers, nothing will get done.

[camelite]

brilliant! I don't have experience in big companies, but for sheer comedic value, I have to commend you!