cnorgate

Irony is he will probably burn more shorts with this announcement than he did with the initial set of tweets... and the SEC helped him do it this time around!

Sounds like it's time for a change to the state constitution. Everything is a negotiation:

"Because the state’s constitution bans any reduction in worker retirement benefits, the government’s pension costs will continue to rise as it faces pressure to pay down that debt, a squeeze that has pushed Illinois’s bond rating to the precipice of junk."

Where in the Rust belt? I agree, much more affordable. Interested in which city you chose, and what your experience has been...?

Just because certain people can't describe or understand the value of a given task or job, doesn't mean it has no value. Clearly if person A pays person B to perform a task, then person B must be creating at least as much value as they're being paid. Who are you or I to judge that value? We're neither receiving the value nor paying for it. If person A is consistently paying more than $2 for $1 of value, then they'll soon be out of money, and the system will unceremoniously remove person A from decision making authority.

While it's nice to suggest that Wall St. doesn't create any value for people, ~20% of our GDP would suggest otherwise. The truth is that Wall St. acts much like Adam Smith's invisible hand. For our system to work, capital must be allocated to optimal uses. Command economies do a poor job of this, except in war time. Wall St. helps us reallocate capital to the most productive endeavors. That sounds pretty valuable to me. Even if the folks on Wall St. don't build your car, they did pool the capital necessary to finance the construction of the manufacturing facility. Can't have one without the other.

As a final point, if the 'caring class' isn't compensated enough, perhaps it's because there is an oversupply of 'caring folks'. Or perhaps they're not really creating any value for others? Perhaps some of the 'caring class' should get creative and find other ways to be caring, or perhaps they should find ways to provide more 'care' with their time so they can command a higher share of the value they create?

At the very least they are the product owner, and if needed can step into a scrum master role depending on resources / constraints.

Call it whatever job title you want, there inevitably needs to be someone steering the boat. You can get rid of 'PMs' but you can't get rid of the need to set strategy / vision, understand the customer problem, identify solutions, collaborate with design and corral the rest of the organization (marketing, sales, support, operations) to bring it all together. If you don't have a PM performing those functions, then a member of the engineering team needs to step up, or perhaps someone from the executive team. But then guess what... that person is doing the things that PMs do, so I guess you might start calling them a PM...? Or a 'Product Editor'... or 'Program Manager'. All just names for something pretty similar.

When organizations are small enough, the whole team performs those functions together. As you grow it makes sense to have someone double down and own those responsibilities. Though this doesn't absolve engineers of the need to understand customers and help paint the product vision.

Perhaps the better question is 'Where did all the non-technical-purely-business-MBA PMs go?'

The answer is that it is likely a disappearing breed. An MBA won't teach you how to build great software or lead technology teams, so it's foolish to believe that someone with such credentials would be a natural fit to come lead a software organization. Good PMs I've worked with can have a conversation about the technology stack as easily as they can debate a marketing strategy. Great PMs these days need to span the entire 'company stack' if that makes sense.

Lastly, if you don't know why a given role exists, then it's probably because you haven't worked with someone great in that role. There are a number of roles in tech companies I found less useful until I met someone who had mastered the craft - when I saw them in action, it became clear why the role existed and how they could perform a certain function infinitely better than I.

As a last thought, I worked at Intuit a while back and I'm not sure they are a 'shining star' of PM training. They have done a good job of 'marketing' themselves that way, and they are an example of a company that typically has 'less technical' PMs in their organization. This is because Intuit is more of a 'marketing / business' driven organization. This contrasts with Google who is known to favor promoting engineers into the PM role. Neither model is 100% - the ideal is probably somewhere in between.

Just recently got in the market for home furniture. Found it a bit of a mess. Something like this could be useful - effectively like hipmunk, but for furniture. i.e. make the experience of understanding your options and finding what you want easier.

I like it.

I also noticed you guys are up in Toronto (my original hometown). If you want more candid feedback from someone in the market for furniture, or if I can help with anything else silicon valley related (I live in SF). Let me know.

This article is confusing cause and effect. Bus routes have been opened to cater to people who choose to live in desirable neighborhoods. It's not the buses that make the neighborhood desirable. If all googlers decided they wanted to live in Marin, I would bet that google would send a bus up there in a heartbeat.

I work with The Climate Corp as a product manager - there have been no problems retaining employees. In fact, from my point of view, morale is higher than before the acquisition. We are pretty passionate about our mission of helping farmers improve their yields. Our vision is to use data and analytics to help them do that in a more sustainable way. The acquisition has helped accelerate our vision by at least 3-5 years - which is why people are pretty excited... also why we are hiring aggressively.

The Climate Corp is one of the best companies I've worked for - the combination of great (and smart) people, mission, vision and real world impact are hard come by. If you're interested in learning more, I'd be happy to chat anytime.

hpvic - not sure if you're working this solo, or as a bigger team, but I'm a PM, I love Trello, haven't used Pivotal, and can't stand Jira. I've been considering building out a Jira-killer myself as a side project. Might be good to chat and hear more of what you're working on. If you want to connect my email is cameron.norgate at the gmail. Cheers!

You can form your own opinions about global warming, rising ocean levels, the acidification of the seas, the destruction of our rain forests or the unsustainable nature of our carbon based economy (see peak oil). I don't have time to reference the multitude of articles on the subject, but they're abundantly available... there's this great site called Google.com which can help you with that.

Regarding the issue of 'natural beauty' in the world, I see it on a micro-level when I go to a lake in the summer that was once pristine but is now overrun with seaweed due to Nitrogen runoff from farmer fields. I see it on a macro level when I read about things my children's generation might never enjoy, like the beauty of a coral reef.

At the end of the day with so much 'pseudo science' thrown around from fringe scientists, all anyone has is an 'opinion'. You now have mine.