[Nemi]

I am an engineer by trade, but I would argue product is more important than engineering. WHAT you work on is ultimately more important than HOW it is achieved from my experience. Yes, bad engineering will ruin a product, but it is all moot if you are not working on the right thing. So many companies I have worked with are working on the wrong thing. Another way to put it is, a company with a great product that has bad engineering will outperform a company that has great engineering but a bad product. Product/market fit rules all. Once I understood this I was able to work with the product team better.

[wittycardio]

Yeah I mean I work at a place that thankfully has no "product" team. That was a valuable thing at a certain place but it's been replicated needlessly and most product managers are glorified project managers with no power or responsibility.

[danielmarkbruce]

Does your company sell software products/services? Or you are building internal software/consulting?

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

^ and this attitude is _exactly_ why so many companies can't get anything done and why I explicitly pointed out that software developers tend to be smarter than your product people.

So lets be very clear on what I was saying.

software developers can do the job of product, product cannot do the job of software developers

It kills me how many people seem to think the doers are the least important part of it. Gamedev gets this right with the insistence that the idea guy is worthless.

I work as a software architect and I see this all the time.

[danielmarkbruce]

There are several things you might not see. Folks who have done both jobs will say this.

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

It's not a job, it's a role, one that senior developers take on all the time.

It gets turned into a job and the result is business people constantly bitching about why everything is slow and what DOES get done is never what they wanted.

The phone game is real.

[danielmarkbruce]

It's a job of many roles and it's a crazy difficult job to do well at. I'd never do it again. Engineering feels like a cake walk in comparison.

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

The reason you found it so hard is because you weren't doing the implementation, which is why software developers should be taking on that role.

At that point you're a glorified translator hoping that both sides are understanding each other perfectly. And what's worse is they both speak English!

[danielmarkbruce]

Translating between who? I don't think we share the same experiences with companies, roles etc, so we might be talking past each other. Product is a pretty ill-defined role.

[wittycardio]

Then youve never done any real engineering lol. People who say this tend to work in less technical types of "software development"

[danielmarkbruce]

Most people who have done real engineering and real product jobs will tell you PM is a harder job to do well.

There is more pressure, less control, more uncertainty, more people to keep happy, more ambiguity. And the number of context switches is high. One has to be highly organized too. Crazy difficult to do well. Very easy to do poorly.

It is a lot easier to be a bad PM than an engineer, I'll grant you that. And most PMs aren't great.

[wittycardio]

Yeah product managers have a very high opinion of themselves lol. While a handful might be really valuable most are worse than worthless