[overgard]

I won’t take credit for this insight, but as someone else pointed out, everyone oversimplifies other people’s jobs. To PMs engineers are just code monkeys that they won’t need soon. To engineers, PMs are the guys that manage Jira. Designers are the fussy people that make things look pretty. The reality is all these jobs have intricacies AI absolutely sucks at but those intricacies are lost in the larger discussion.

As a coder though, I’ll point out this is why the “AI solved coding” shit drives me crazy. You only believe that if you don’t know how to code or you have an agenda.

[devsda]

Instead of engineer vs PM/manager I separate those jobs based on these categories.

1. How long they can survive in the job while being mediocre or outright bad at their job.

2. Probability of failing upwards.

Engineering roles tend to filter out bad candidates more early, quickly and the probability of failing upwards is less when compared to PM and managerial roles.

Also, in my experience PM and managerial roles looks like skills based jobs but they tend to select individuals with specific personality types and they are more likely to excel.

Developer roles also select towards certain personality types but I think its more diverse than we care to admit.

[adithyassekhar]

And for people who never liked it in the first place and just wanted a quick buck.

[tadfisher]

You can't pay Claude with equity though

[maininformer]

You can tell him and he will love it and I bet he has encoded the behavior of working better because of it just how some tried threatening LLMs to work harder

[ares623]

which doesn't make sense because the quick buck train is gonna stop. But then again, maybe there wasn't any sense in them in the first place.

[idontwantthis]

Do people really think like that? I see the other people at my company as human beings solving complex problems whether they are an engineer, a manager, an exec, or HR.

[e40]

Absolutely. This is precisely why people are saying AI will eliminate software jobs.

[idontwantthis]

Do we need more of those “If you think it’s so easy, try being me for a day!” sitcom episodes?

[threethirtytwo]

No. There are intricacies to every job but these are intricacies that are learnable. It’s like learning how to drive. It’s a skill for sure but anyone can do it after practice.

I thought programming was the same thing for a long time but have grown to find out that this is not the case. There are many people who cannot learn programming in a reasonable amount of time and therefore are unable to pick up the skill. It is not universal like car driving.

The thing with being a PM or a designer is that this skill is learnable. Anyone can do it. The reason why these jobs are segregated is because society is under the delusion that these are special skills that require intense training when at most he training is equivalent to learning how to drive.

Some of you may be thinking I’m insane but there are tons of jobs that are like this. The presidency for example. You can be senile and insane and still be president. The country doesn’t blow up just because you’re insane. Or maybe this isn’t a good characterization.

Hmm electrician or plumber is the better comparison. The skill level required to be a PM or designer is equivalent to electrician or plumber. Anyone can pick it up with training. It’s not rocket science folks.

[paulhebert]

Huh as someone who has a career doing both design and engineering I disagree with this take.

I think both skills can be learned. I also think that people have intrinsic talents that make them better or worse at those skills.

Put another way, anyone can learn to code but some people will never be great at it while others have a natural talent. Same for design.

I’m curious why you think otherwise. What’s the difference in your mind?

[chamomeal]

I’m kinda getting off topic here but anecdotally: I’ve tried to get so many of my friends to learn programming. I love it, and I think a lot of em would love it too. But they hit a hard wall with the patience needed to self learn.

Like the moment something doesn’t happen like the tutorial said (error message saying “idk what python is, you mean python3?”), they just give up completely instead of googling it. I really feel like the venn diagram of “people who can code” and “people who can google errors they don’t understand for a couple hours” is nearly a perfect circle.

LLMs can smooth out those little tediums, so maybe more people really will be able to learn programming now. But then again if you don’t have the patience to trudge through the annoying parts, will you have the patience to be confused and struggle, instead of letting Claude do the hard stuff for you? I’ll be interested to see what future self-taught devs look like!

[thunky]

Your friends struggle with learning programming because they don't care enough about learning it. You're the only one that cares.

Same can be said for any skill.

Threads like this bother me a bit because it makes programmers seem so smug, like they are this gifted class that is able to wizard the machine where mere mortals cannot.

Its intellectual elitism.

[threethirtytwo]

Regardless of that. I do think it's true that not anyone can learn it.

But the "elitism" is becoming something that is less and less relevant because people are less needing to learn it anymore thanks AI.

[chamomeal]

> intellectual elitism

I was trying to say the opposite!! Googling errors for hours is NOT in intellectually demanding task. It’s tedious.

[an_guy]

What I have observed is, if you don't know what the issue is, llm would usually suggest something that is unnecessarily complex and not ideal.

It might work but the moment something fails, llm suggest hacks instead of solution.

[alemanek]

Hard agree here. I think the best predictor of whether someone will be good, eventually, at something is “do they love it”. If they do then chances are they will spend lots of focused time practicing and actively seeking out ways to get better.

Maybe that love, or at least liking something, comes from inherent talent to some degree but all the talent in the world won’t help you if you don’t put in the time.

[menaerus]

Maybe you can learn to be mediocre or good enough designer or similarly good enough or mediocre engineer. But I don't think you can actually learn to be a great designer or great engineer - it just takes a different set of skills and evolutionary and genetic material which isn't available to all the people. Some people are simply not good enough in logical and abstract reasoning, math, and similar range of skills which are essential for becoming a good engineer. Similarly someone who is a good engineer doesn't and likely can't have skills required to become a good designer, it just takes a brain which is hardwired and developed differently.

[paulhebert]

As someone who considers themselves a good engineer and a good designer (and does both professionally) I hope that last bit isn’t true

[menaerus]

Sure, this is why I said likely. If you are good in both then I believe this isn't something commonly found in people.

[threethirtytwo]

Hard disagree. Design is easy and trivial. Thinking it's hard is a sort of mass delusion. Engineering is the hard thing.

[threethirtytwo]

Easy. I met people who tried really hard to learn how to code and failed.

Design on the other hand especially modern design is easy. It's just text placement, geometric shapes and proper colors that synergize. This isn't like anatomical drawings or oil paintings. It's not just easy, it's obviously easy. What needs to be learned is how to use the tools and do it with speed which does take time and training, but again this is not rocket science, a lot of what looks "good" and "modern" is intuitive and obvious. And modern design is just easy to draw.

I mean look at hacker news. It's pretty clean. I like the aesthetic. I bet a "designer" didn't even touch it.

[paulhebert]

This shows a deep misunderstanding of what design is.

What you’ve described is “visual design” which is a subset of the design field.

There are many sub-specialties, but at its core design is about problem-solving, communication, and empathy.

There are a lot of bad designers who are great at making things pretty.

A good designer spends more time researching, understanding the problem space, interviewing users, brainstorming, etc., than pushing pixels around.

[KellyCriterion]

OP is right!

Most designers see themself above others because they are somehow good in putting different elements together and say: This is great.

And for whatever reason, even the most worst youngster designers consider themself to be gurus, like everybody who learnt coding yesterday wouldnt say "Im John Carmack".

Designers are a special type of people

[threethirtytwo]

The context of this thread is visual design for websites. Not design for off topic bullshit like furniture.

Also I agree with a lot of what you said. The only difference is I feel anyone can do it. The qualities you attributed to a good designer are trivial to learn. Make no mistake it takes time and effort to do these things and many companies neeed a specialized role where someone is only doing this thing…

But anyone can do it and learn it. And not anyone can learn how to program.

[blehn]

> It’s like learning how to drive. It’s a skill for sure but anyone can do it after practice.

The analogy only illustrates the parent's point. Most licensed drivers have been doing it for years and are still terrible drivers, because they never grasp the intricacies of driving — smoothly accelerating and decelerating, smoothing out corners, anticipating light changes, gauging merge distances and timings, using mirrors well, ensuring cars get by when making a left turn in an intersection, etc, etc

[threethirtytwo]

>The analogy only illustrates the parent's point. Most licensed drivers have been doing it for years and are still terrible drivers, because they never grasp the intricacies of driving — smoothly accelerating and decelerating, smoothing out corners, anticipating light changes, gauging merge distances and timings, using mirrors well, ensuring cars get by when making a left turn in an intersection, etc, etc

This is not true at all. Most drivers pick this up. You only tend to see this with beginning drivers and it eventually becomes better. The overwhelming majority of people learn how to drive and they learn how to drive quite well.

[blehn]

After riding in countless Ubers and Lyfts, with drivers who drive all day for a living, I can say confidently that good drivers who grasp the intricacies of driving are by far the exception.

[krackers]

>designer is that this skill is learnable

Why do you think this? Being a designer is ultimately a matter of "good taste" and intuition for HIG (that you learn to systematize and formalize) and not everyone has this to start off with. Lack of good taste is how you get stuff like liquid glass. People can learn to compensate for lack of good intuition, but it's the same as someone without innate mathematical aptitude compensating for intuition by "grinding through the algebra".

[threethirtytwo]

>This is an absurd take. Everyone looks at the other side and says, "Yeah I could do that". Few can.

Clearly Apple pays someone tons of money and calls them a designer and pays you nothing because your anti liquid glass opinion is shit to them. Coming here and talking as if your opinion on what "good design" is the end all be all lacks nuance and perspective.

Overall design at it's core is text placement along with media like pictures or graphs. And then putting it along with interactive buttons. It's a form of art, and this art is significantly easier than say figure drawing or painting with realism. The main reason is because the shapes used are simple, no complex shading, no need to really think about how light shines on a complex surface or how clothe interacts with the human body. Just some flat colors some typography, placement of some buttons to transition to other pages and that's it.

People are biased, but all you need to do is stare at the mona lisa, and then at the spotify logo and it's totally obvious that one took skill and the other took just just some thought. Design is easy. Liquid glass ironically is the one modern design trope that would actually take skill to render by hand, but of course we have algorithms doing it so it's more the skill of the programmer than an artist.

[jghn]

> I thought programming was the same thing for a long time but have grown to find out that this is not the case.

> The thing with being a PM or a designer is that this skill is learnable.

This is an absurd take. Everyone looks at the other side and says, "Yeah I could do that". Few can.

[threethirtytwo]

>This is an absurd take. Everyone looks at the other side and says, "Yeah I could do that". Few can.

For designers, all you need to do is look at the google logo. That's the epitome of skill in design. It's trivial to come up with a multi colored word and have it fit in a sort of clean aesthetic.

For PMs it's much more harder to prove it to you. So I won't go about this useless endeavor. Suffice to say it's not really automatically "absurd". It's more likely you have some sort of identity and connection with being a PM and you're proud of that identity and your attack here is a defense.

If you truly were disagreeing with me in an unbiased way, you wouldn't just call it "absurd".

[braebo]

I’d love to see some of your design work.

[threethirtytwo]

Yeah that’s a trap. Because design is so opinion based if I put anything out here you can call it utter crap and say it’s proof on how I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Anything said about design can’t be proven simply because it’s an aesthetic opinion. However we do have common opinions on what looks good and what doesn’t look good but the kind of study to prove that is unreadable on HN.

[gregoryl]

Are you mistaking your interactions with low level trades roles (the guy who's making bank fixing power sockets on the weekend) with say, the people maintaining factory electrical systems? or designing them?

[threethirtytwo]

Nah more like the guy who wires up the whole house.

Factory electrical systems are on another level than your typical 110V AC. But given what I know I would say that the factory electrician sits right at the borderline between comparable to SWE and anyone can learn it.

[KellyCriterion]

hahaha, the skill level required for electrician is equivalent to a PM or designer?

In which country is this?

Most PM and designers would fail the (simple) math to be a qualified electrician in any EU conutry :) (in this comparison I would actually grade designers to be "business oriented people" like PM, not technical oriented people, though lot of designers use technical tools)

[threethirtytwo]

You're right. There's more skill in being a electrician than being a PM or designer. I was being generous.

[vitaflo]

One of the more ignorant comments I've read on HN which is saying something.

[threethirtytwo]

No, the ignorance is with you. It's obvious. Ignorance is evident in how a person approaches an opposing opinion. Does the person question it or does the person label the other as "ignorant" and then move on? The later is actually the one that's ignorant, and that's you.