snapetom

There has been writing on the wall for non-technical PdMs for years now, especially at small, mid-size companies. They lack the technical chops to eliminate friction for engineering teams, and I've witnessed way too many examples where they don't technically align their products to the greater enterprise ecosystem.

We're in interesting times. Many large, non-tech companies digitized ~30 years ago by building instead of buying. We're at a stage where many are now forced to pay off the technical debt accumulated since then, and many realize that it wasn't just engineering that's responsible for the debt, it was non-technical PMs, too. Many PdM job descriptions are now looking for people from engineering backgrounds to fill those roles to avoid this in the future.

That's what my last company told themselves. Five different simple client/server applications in its suite, five different architectures with different language/framework/storage choices. At one point, my senior engineer spent 6 months writing his own Java threading library because he thought he was smarter than Java devs.

I was hired as a TPdM. I unabashedly wrestled technology decisions away from them because these "senior" and "principal" engineers obviously showed they could not be trusted.

I explored specializing in health econ in college. My professor put it this way - health care is a scarce good. There's only so many doctors, so much medicine, so many beds. You have to control access to the goods somehow, otherwise you have Tragedy of the Commons.

In the rest of the world, it's controlled by extended wait times. In the US, it's cost. You can have moral arguments about what's fair, but that's the economic reality.

At the time I as studying this (early 2010's), the average wait time of diagnosis to first treatment for breast cancer in the US was 12 days. In NIH, it was 5 months.

I recently talked about how I got an old iPod 5.5 off eBay because it fit all my usability needs. Celebrity linux hacker unsarcastically told me I should have built my own MP3 player with ESP32, an audio codec board, and micropython.

Ah, I see. Thanks. Having the metadata in a DB sounds a lot more robust.

Is this basically a table format like Delta/Iceberg but with an SQL engine built in via DuckDB?

Great. Now do H4, PERM, and OPT next. Close all the loopholes. Numberwise H4 is 4x bigger than H1B.

H1B is a lamb big tech is willing to sacrifice to satisfy the populists. You want real change, get rid of the rest.

Definitely my favorite physicist for the same reason you state. The notion that he just went around different fields and said “here’s how math can improve things,” invented some new approach, and moved on to another field to do it all over again just cracks me up.

Hah. Paul Ehrlich was my high school graduation speaker. Stanford's Professorville was districted to my high school, so I'm sure some parent were friends with him or something.

Man, what a boring, downer speech. He just talked about how my generation was screwed, and we would have world wide famines at any moment now. Great topic for a bunch of kids about to head off to college and start their lives, Paul.

I was in a pretty decent econ program big public university. The program and our professors at the time had close Wall Street ties due to proximity. Despite that, no professor took themselves very seriously and many would make constant cracks about the absurdity of the field and why would anyone listen to them. It was a totally cool department of self-aware smart people.

It absolutely is different. You just said the Mac Mini is upgradable but the Pi is still soldered on. Desoldering and soldering a new RAM unit carries huge risks no matter how skilled people claim they are at it.

When done right, product management is 90% idea generation and market/user research. So many companies do it poorly that PdMs are beaten to think their job is to wallow in bureaucracy and metrics.

LLMs are great at helping with aspects of market research and that’s about it. Aka it’s a good deep search engine. It’s not going to decide what features solve certain customer pain points. It’s certainly not going to prioritize and coordinate between competing stakeholders.

Good lord. Please use logic and Occam's Razor this.

Muse is a platinum album winning band that's got 10 albums over 20 years. If this was stolen, they (and their label) would be raising hell.

Last year, I was recruiting a data scientist for a side project. I was referred to two DSes, albeit from academia, to help.

Neither had their own personal laptop. One kept his laptop in the office all the time and just used an iPad at home. The other just plain didn't have a personal one. Work was the only one she had and she had to return it when she got laid off.

Good lord. Smart people doing the dumbest things with their work equipment.

I have a former coworker who was the VP of Finance at my company. He suddenly got fired out of the blue. The company was in the midst of trying to find a buyer (this was announced) so this was extra surprising. Turns out, he knew a lot of bad news about the company, and they caught him looking for a job. They fired him because he was too much of a liability.

How did they catch him? He was putting resumes and cover letters on OneDrive. "Yeah, in retrospect, that's one of the dumber things I've ever done," he said to me later.