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The answer, of course, is that the taste-making apparatus inside the typical tech company is now entirely imposters (non-technical, non-power-users), who contin

• harimau777 2mo ago
  I've actually had the opposite problem much more often: Managers who were promoted due to their skill as a developer who have no skill in management or leadership.
• amoorthy 2mo ago
  Mostly agree and would add that product managers should be responsible for the commercial success of their products. That means spending more time deciding what market to be in, how to differentiate, how to price, how to drive adoption. For the most part these are not strengths for devs and power users.
  • therealdrag0 2mo ago
    Are they not? Where I work PMs are closely tied to and own business outcomes.
    • amoorthy 1mo ago
      Sorry, didn't see this reply till now. I think a lot of PMs are judged just on shipping software, not necessarily commercial success, or even just production adoption.
• entropy47 2mo ago
  There are good PMs out there watching in horror as their peers make changes and features that are obviously doomed (to anybody with a functional brain). I also write as much code as the median engineer on my team (skews junior). Please don't write off the entire profession based on many (most?) being awful - if you work with a good PM some day I promise you will find there is an important point to the job.
  • nxc18 2mo ago
    I want to agree with this, but I’ve watched the PM discipline, in concert with the even more dastardly MBAs, ruin everything I hold dear.
    • entropy47 2mo ago
      I think it's a question of integrity - I have reached a comfortable ceiling in my career, but doing the dumb shit would have got me further, faster. I don't begrudge the peers who have sold out when the delta is $1m+ a year but I personally got into CS for the art, not the money. A lot of people know the exec bandwagon things are going to fail and do it anyway because of incentive misalignment.
• jason_oster 2mo ago
  > The solution is to gut your product org, replace management with leading engineers, and hire some of your most fanatic users. They don't need to do anything other than give their opinions, and use the product every day. Put them in a room with your top engineers, and the software will mysteriously get better. I feel like there's this one random comment on HN that should be adopted on its merits alone, but everyone will ignore for no good reason. This will never happen because entrenchment and bureaucracy will strangle every product organization and every organizational reboot attempt. It's probably the right solution, but the resistance built into organizations assembled by bad decision makers cannot be overcome. Maybe the best you can do is try to find a legal way to spin-off a competitor with a truly fresh start.
  • rtpg 2mo ago
    I've worked with good product people. They come up with good ideas, have great suggestions, leave latitude for implementation issues to guide some of the design, and work well in the constraints. It is kinda amazing because you might be given a good idea/ticket, and it just flows smoothly and naturally (building on top of existing good product design of course) Having them around is like 100000x better than having just random engineers be doing product design. And "oh just listen to your power users"... come on folks, surely we know about designing our software into a corner right? I'm saying all this but am very sympathetic to the pain brought by bad product people (or just like ... mid product people. It's a hard space)
    • marklubi 2mo ago
      I started using the term “opinionated software” a little over 15 years when I was starting a new company. I built what I wanted as a participant and a fan of the sport. Lots of other people had their opinions on it (“you’re doing it wrong and everyone wants it this way,” “you must have this feature” which barely anyone actually uses… the power users), but I held fast with my opinion (did usability testing to prove the it was easier to achieve the goals to back up my opinion) and I’m glad I did. It changed an industry for the better. Excellent usability and functional design that achieves a goal better and easier will win people over. I also built it with an API so that people can build their own versions of it with the same data, because others also have strong opinions, and I whole heartedly respect that. Some interesting things have come from it that are more targeted for specific users and situations. Pretty cool to see what others make. While I don’t know how opinionated the guys that created Dark Sky were with it, I would guess that it’s a good example. It was different from all the other apps in their category in the way it surfaced information. Their new app is good (not quite as great as the original), but they’ve really spent a lot of time making a really usable and functional system. Edit: About that same time in my life, I also realized that I no longer just wanted functional, I wanted both functional and form. I wanted well designed functional stuff. Turns out that people like that too.
• Nition 2mo ago
  I love this comment.
• afavour 2mo ago
  > The solution is to gut your product org, replace management with leading engineers, and hire some of your most fanatic users. It’s not surprising that this sentiment is popular on a message board filled with engineers but I’m not so convinced by it. Nor do I think the current state of tech companies is acceptable, to be clear. But there needs to be some level of management outside of the engineers themselves. A lot of talented lead engineers I know are terrible people managers, or ineffective project managers. And that’s fine, because there are other people to do those tasks. If your utopia is a bunch of engineers given freedom to do whatever they want, however they want to do it… I suspect the dream and the reality will not match up. In the scenario you’ve outlined I strongly suspect you’ll have infrastructure on its third rewrite, full of power user features and tweaks… and near-zero adoption from newcomers. Product fit is a thing that needs to be managed!
  • slopinthebag 2mo ago
    Yeah I hate that you’re right. Blender is an example of OSS software which is actually a joy to use and they have product designers. But I think there is a massive gap between good and bad product people. No product person would be better than bad ones, but for truly great software you probably want some good ones. That being said lots of good OSS exists purely built by engineers so I think it’s really the case that good product people help a lot and bad ones hurt a ton.
    • Silhouette 2mo ago
      Some developers also take an active interest in the design and feature set of the product they're developing. IME those developers can often produce good results once a general direction is set if they have access to real users to collect feedback. But it's important to recognise that these are essentially two completely distinct skill sets and mindsets and it just happens that some people have both. It's not really any different to the old arguments when continuing a career beyond senior dev level meant moving into management but there was no guarantee that just because someone had been a competent developer they would also be any good at managing anything. Some were and produced great results - in some cases informed by their understanding as former developers about what would be possible and what it would realistically cost - but in other cases the Peter Principle hit early.
• rdedev 2mo ago
  > The solution is to gut your product org, replace management with leading engineers, and hire some of your most fanatic users. They don't need to do anything other than give their opinions, and use the product every day. Put them in a room with your top engineers, and the software will mysteriously get better. This will just lead to massive selection bias. If all you care about are power users go for it. Otherwise you end up with a complicated system that is going to put off new users. You can even have different power users who likes different parts of the software. Now it's totally possible to end up with extensive subsystems that don't really gel with each other My anecdote for this is the the recentish redesign of Musescore. Tantacrul, the ux designer/product manager for Musescore has an hour long video on how he redesigned the interface and UX of the software. He is also a musician so you can call him a power users if you want but that was not the users he had in mind when redesigning the UX https://youtu.be/Qct6LKbneKQ https://youtu.be/Qct6LKbneKQ
  • Dead3 2mo ago
    > This will just lead to massive selection bias. If all you care about are power users go for it. Simple things should work. The types of errors described in the article about feature creep and errors with simple user flows are all too common. Just surf the web with the developer console open. It's not just "an error was thrown", but the kinds of errors and how they manifest. A rejected promise after localStorage access was blocked, after user clicked a submit button on a form that went through twenty seven delegation calls of Angular js using backspace-escaped method names to handle invalid HTML, and now the form can't submit because they did it using the latest tools, as per their resume. Crap like that. The level of quality of production web code is the cause of the poor user experience and outright failures. It is unacceptable and its cause is directly traceable to the design decisions and skills employed in its production.
• Gigachad 2mo ago
  Devs and power users create something like libreoffice or thunderbird. They are incredibly resistant to any change for any reason and hang on to what they already know rather than what’s best. The reality is most people actually like the stuff Apple and such are putting out and like modern UX more. The only bad stuff is deliberate enshitification which is pushed by financial incentives rather than product people being incompetent.
  • throwup238 2mo ago
    The financial incentives draw incompetent people. It’s happened with finance, law, management consulting, and now software.
    • bloomca 2mo ago
      But software has been lucrative for very long time at this point. Can you say that the quality went downhill more than a decade ago? I personally do agree that when I see an update I feel something between annoyance or dread (what is broken this time?).
• Rury 2mo ago
  Yup. This is basically what Steve Jobs argued throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and championed as a philosophy. Adopting it, took Apple from being a struggling tech company on the verge of bankruptcy, to the dominant personal consumer technology maker it is today.
  • deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
• therealdrag0 2mo ago
  Why would engineers as a class be better at product than product people as a class?
  • defrost 2mo ago
    That's a function of choice of "better" metric. Traditional engineers are "better" at making things work in a functional sense (eg: aircraft) whereas product people are optimised to make "better" selling products (eg: Labubus - functionally useless but Black Friday riot desirable)
  • Balooga 2mo ago
    A reason is different performance metrics. One bonus depends on "make number go up". The other realizes that making "number go up" degrades the experience for the product as a whole. An example. I worked for many years at a major satellite TV company. The customer support department were spending a lot of time and money handling customer calls due to signal loss because of inclement weather, and they wanted something done about it. Department X pushed for removing the 1-800 support number from the on-screen-display, because of the "quick win". No visible phone number means some customers would just give up. Who cares that this would frustrate customers even more. Department Y pushed for reworking the UX flows around helping the user troubleshoot the problem, point them to their DVR recordings or alternative shows on broadband if connected, and automatically rebook the interrupted shows.
• ThrowawayR2 2mo ago
  Part of me wants to agree with you; I've seen a lot of lousy PMs in my career. But when placed in the driver's seat with the same mandate to bring in more customers and revenue (or else), I've also seen developers drive products straight into the ground just as hard. It's a nice fantasy about nerds being able to do better at everyone else's but that's all it is, a fantasy.
• jayd16 2mo ago
  If software is solved then the power users can be in charge because there is no technical moat. Competition should thrive as imposter-ware flounders, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
• tgv 2mo ago
  I see where you're coming from, but my experience says (TLDR): lack of dogfooding. In my current job, I'm building a system which has replaced the "SaaS" we used before. Not only was it fairly expensive, and sluggish, it was also not good, and in some parts even bad. And that fits a pattern I've seen before: that SaaS product, a survey platform, was built by a company that builds software, but doesn't use it. Engineers nor management are involved in making actual surveys and processing the results at any scale. The result is a system that requires bizarre hacks to make the system do what you need it to do. OTOH, I work right next to the people that use my software, and some of which have a lot of experience. We're small, independent, there's not much management involved, and everyone is aligned, and we all talk to each other. Not knowing what your customers actually need is one of the big faults of software engineering, and in large companies, architects, engineers, and management can be quite far removed from their customers' experience.
• madduci 2mo ago
  The real.answer is that people stopped making things with care and genuine interest. Everything should be delivered in the fastest way possible, in the shortest time possible, on the tightest budget possible. This is a recipe for creating a mess, in which AI has now pushed the limits and we are seeing how failure is now per-default embedded and shipped to users, who are now beta-testing products continuously.
  • classified 2mo ago
    We have been beta-testing the outcome of incompetent software production processes long before AI. But LLMs do accelerate the slop production. And if what you're shipping is going to be a bloated buggy mess anyway, then LLMs really do make you more "productive".
  • chii 2mo ago
    > Everything should be delivered in the fastest way possible, in the shortest time possible, on the tightest budget possible. because companies that did this is rewarded with more users and more revenue (than a hypothetical competitor that didnt). Darwinian natural selection is about survival of the fittest, not survival of the "best looking" or "best performing". And the determination of fitness is by the actions of consumers, not what they state verbally.
    • madduci 2mo ago
      This happens because of capitalism. In a few years will have a cemetery of software and products locked behind DRM or requiring a remote connection to a server that won't exist anymore, because it's too expensive to maintain. It is already happening, the effect will be much more amplified sooner
      • quacked 2mo ago
        The days where middle and high-end goods were of a relatively higher quality were also produced under a capitalist system, though. The US was capitalist when it built my parents' normal washer/dryer combination that lasted for 25 years with no interruptions to service, and it was capitalist when Google was first invented and you could conduct literal string searches on the internet. I don't think there's anything inherent to "capitalism" that causes degradation of product lines that doesn't also cause the creation of the product lines in the first place. My suspicion is that the "great enshittification" has more to do with the swelling in numbers and purchasing/borrowing power of the lower classes. The middle class now has worse computers and dryers [1], but the lower class now has computers and dryers. Corporations can still make colossal sales numbers with degraded products because they're selling to people for whom possessing a product at all is a major life upgrade, and aren't worried about "the best version of this product". The same is happening to movies and TV. [1] Many will point out that on paper and in certain metrics modern goods outperform past goods, but I think the extremely high prices commanded by quality vintage and near-vintage goods across all genres of product lines speaks for itself.