alt Hacker NewsIn my experience, those roles never existed to begin with in well run teams and companies. Some companies drive product managers into this role, but that was always a bad use of their time. Even with AI tools, I still don't feel like I have the skills to do the job of a good product manager, which requires the kind of vision and business acumen that I am just not as good at as the best PMs I've worked with.
Yeah right after I posted I thought about editing in that a 3-4 all-programmer team with one person (maybe half-time) acting as basically team secretary was already the best unit for software writing, but bigcos seemed to have trouble forming them without adding a bunch of overhead and making their programmers often blocked or idle for some reason.
It’s just that now if I have an LLM that can talk to my business comms and reporting tools (jira was already mostly for managers to generate reports, not to help the people doing the work, that’s why it sucks so much as a tool for getting actual work done) and my first-pass at programming looks a lot like just writing a programmerly-flavored feature or bug ticket, having other people making useless first drafts of tickets for me to rewrite (and probably have to go clarify them with an SME or stakeholder anyway) and someone dedicated to poking around in Jira in general, is gonna start looking funny even to bigcos, I think.