Margins will not climb to 100%. As inference gets cheaper, buyers will ask more of their agents, shifting the equilibrium over time in response to competition.
We talked in an earlier chapter about Resistance being the strongest at the finish line. It is. Resistance knows we’re about to defeat it. It summons all its genius and all its power to stop us.
The reason I say that is there's a lot of programmers who are not very good product managers. Software is product management. What should it do? Who should it do it for? How should it do it? How should it look? What are our priorities? What do we start with first? What does version one include? All of those skills are not easily or equally distributed across all programmers.
And I've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs over the years where they're like, "Oh man, we're just cranking. We're on easy street right now." And I'm like, "Dude, you are about to get your ass whooped and you don't even know it."
hiring so many PMs infantilizes the engineers and the designers who are perfectly capable of making good decisions, but just never had to because there was always a PM to babysit them.
There's like I think four or five people across the team who manage other PMs. All of them would spend 90 plus percent of their time doing IC work. I'm still probably 50% of my time doing IC work personally.
there's definitely a group of PMs and I certainly used to be one of them earlier in my career whose specialty wasn't technical or customer-oriented, it was politics.
rather than mapping PMs to teams where you kind of assume that the PM will always do that, we tend to map them to kind of problems or kind of like core projects.
Whereas aerobic exercise on that kind of intensity spectrum we just talked about seems to particularly benefit the gray matter which includes the hippocampus. Resistance training seems to particularly benefit the white matter.
But the coding models have gotten good enough that he can pair the kind of the technical knowledge he does have with his really spiky product sense and sense for writing and sense for users.
In a sense, we're all turning into project managers, right? And and we can have an army of junior programmers called agents that will just spit out reams of code, but someone's got to have the big picture and review all of that. And so, increasingly our craft is going from one of writing the code to one of of reviewing the code and and building the architecture of the code and overseeing the work, if if you will.
Product managers need a solid foundation in statistics to be metrics-driven. This classic book is a lively and fun book will leave you smarter and more skeptical.
Whether you’re a product leader coaching a team member or still early in your product maangement career, Petra Wille will help you break down the essentials of the job and develop a plan for growth.
Levy was given unprecedented access to Google, and the result is what I consider to be an accurate depiction of how the company operates. A good overview of how Google product managers work.
With so many professional money managers afraid to act, with most of the public in the grip of fear and anger, you should put your cash and your courage to work.
The fractures fell neatly along disciplines: engineers using AI to wish away designers, designers wishing away engineers, product managers wishing away both. In this climate, AI becomes frenemy identification technology, another way to avoid working together.
we're looking for high judgment individuals, people that are going to roll up their sleeves and do a lot, whether they're IC's or managers, and people that are going to get the details and perfect their craft, because we know that's how we're going to win is by having the best craft, the best design.
PMs are no longer saying to the designer, hey, can you draw this thing out for me? That frees up designer time to go explore more deeply the stuff they need to go into and it allows anyone to kind of add to that first conversation of where should we go and look further and wider and broader at the option space.
we often also have this mental model of like oh our managers are a judge and they're going to judge me on whether or not I got it I did well I should get a promotion I should be fired so there's this sometimes fear that people have but I think in the very best relationships the manager is like a guide
We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where "what's useful" is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work.
The stereotype is that new managers often micromanage, but at Wave, I've noticed that new managers often err on the side of undermanaging, or being too hands-off, perhaps out of a desire to signal that they trust their reports.
Vibe coding can execute instructions, but deciding what the software should do and why is not automated. Product managers and designers must still do user research, market analysis, and creative brainstorming. In that sense, vibe coding changes the implementation phase more than the planning phase of the product lifecycle.
The definite book about giving good and candid feedback - and a very useful read for new(ish) managers. The book is a list of ideas around the theme of caring personally and challenging directly.
Gallup interviewed thousands of high-performing teams and managers and found a dozen of things each of these teams had in common. While the insights are good, the content itself was quite dry for my taste.
A concise guide for managers, from tech lead, through line managers, managers of managers, all the way to CTO. Very much recommended: I have gone back to re-read parts of it several times.
I also have another less optimistic prediction: as soon as the concept of founder mode becomes established, people will start misusing it. Founders who are unable to delegate even things they should will use founder mode as the excuse. Or managers who aren't founders will decide they should try to act like founders.
And what activism has done, and I think we've helped lead this movement, is it restored the balance of power between the owners of the business and the management of the company. And that's been a very good thing for the performance of the US stock market actually.
Gergely brings an incredible amount of reporting depth to every edition of this newsletter about the nuts and bolts of building technology. A must-read for the tech rank-and-file and their managers.
But everything I have ever experienced leads me to believe that a fewer number of larger teams, each helmed by an experienced engineering manager, should way outperform this gaggle of tiny groups.
A Personal Odyssey by Thomas Sowell My review here . Insights into the mindset required to climb out of poverty and remake one’s fortunes. A countervailing perspective from the above Orwell work.
When I talked about will GPT12 be AGI, my answer is no. Of course not. I mean, cross-entropy loss is never going to get you there. You need probably RL in fancy environments in order to get something that would be considered AGI-like.
Not only is Tina Fey a very funny writer, it's fascinating to have the opportunity to climb inside the head of a successful female leader. Reading the internal drama within Tina's head as she thought about whether she wanted a second child while considering how it would affect the 100+ employees that worked for her on 30 Rock was priceless. As a manager, it gives me an understanding and level of empathy I wouldn't have had otherwise.
Managers should support 6-8 engineers. This gives them enough time for active coaching, coordinating and furthering their team’s mission by writing strategies, leading change, and so on.
Guide to transforming top-down organizations into lean ones, where everyone is a leader. Written by a submarine commander, it’s mostly useful to managers in big corporations and other institutions.
The best frontline eng managers in the world are the ones that are never more than 2-3 years removed from hands-on work, full time down in the trenches. The best individual contributors are the ones who have done time in management.
The bottom line: When trillions of dollars are managed by Wall Streeters charging high fees, it will usually be the managers who reap outsized profits, not the clients. Both large and small investors should stick with low-cost index funds.
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