IMO a lot of the product managers inserting themselves and being useless is good old school project managers pivoting to the new thing and doing the same old stuff. Likewise I do think product management should be part of the senior engineers skillset. Its incredibly useful. Conversely, there are also tons of engineers that dont have this mindset and want a PM to tell them what to do and a barrier from the rest of the organization... which boggles my mind to be fair
Yes, a lot of folks really don’t want to have to care about work. I think it’s simply rubric achieving - them playing out the same thing they did in school. Operating under the constraints of their roles only enough to sustain them, so they can enjoy their lives at recess, so to speak. I get it, though - engineering can’t be everyone’s passion, there must be quite a lot of us just here for the lifestyle.
That's an interesting observation. After some thinking, I agree. It was quite hard to get the PM that replaced me out of the "project management" mindset when she joined.
Also agree about engineering needing to have the PM skillset. Especially in startups.
