My theory is that the government was planning to cut funding, and to stop that from happening someone deliberately created the interference. That's more likely than aliens going extinct after sending one single message.

Statistically speaking, that's more likely than aliens going extinct after sending one single message.

I agree, HN is an amazing community with brilliant people and top quality content, but it's not enough to train an LLM.

Last thing. An LLM is just a tool, it can clean up your writing the same way a photo app can enhance your pictures. It took a while for people to accept that grandma's photos looked professional because they had filters. Same will happen with text. With ChatGPT, anyone can write like a journalist. We're just not used to grandma texting like one, yet :)

The real problem, I believe, starts with companies hiring anyone with people skills as a PM. They don't understand their role and responsibilities, it's common to hear PM say "I own the product." But that's not really true. According to successful founders and CEOs, they are the only ones who truly own the product, and that's an important point for leadership to establish. PMs thinking they own the product creates power struggles with leadership, engineering and design, while a title like "Customer Experience Manager" makes it clear the role is about representing the customer's needs, aligning them with the CEO's vision, and making the right trade-offs.

Business people with knowledge and experience always put the customer at the centre and focus on aligning customer value with business value. In other words, if you're the CEO of Uber and your PM isn't driving a taxi once a week, then, IMO, you hired the wrong person.

For me, the title Product Manager sets the wrong expectation, it makes it sound like they own the product, which clashes with other roles. In reality, they don't own the product, they own alignment: customer needs, business goals, and engineering feasibility.

I've heard many YC founders say that the CEO (or CPO) is the only one who truly owns the product, and I agree. The PM should never own it, they are interpreters who take the CEO's vision, combine it with customer insight, and help the team make the right trade-offs.

Right now, the Product Manager is seen as the CEO's delegate, making sure the product follows business strategy, while the Engineering Manager is the CTO's delegate, making sure the product follows technical strategy. One represents business the other represents technology. But IMO since both are building the product together, the title Product Manager creates competition instead of collaboration.

The software needs the customer just as much as the customer needs the software. That's why I think the roles of Engineering Manager and Customer Manager make more sense, working together to build the best product possible. The product isn't managed by one side, it's managed by both.

However, the real problem isn't the role title, it's the qualifications of the person in the role. Companies don't hire lawyers as Engineering Managers, so why do they hire musicians as Product Managers?

Most of my 10-hour workday people bombard me with messages and meeting requests. Messages I can usually ignore, but meeting requests get abused by some. Anyone can send one anytime and it hijacks your focus.

I wish companies would set a limit on how many meeting requests employees can send per month. At least then people would think twice before stealing someone else's time and attention.

Time thieves are the real productivity killer.

The result, which you often see in companies with 300+ employees, is that engineers have far more experience building products than their PMs, what engineers usually lack is knowledge of the customer and their pain points, and a roadmap that leads to successful outcomes. In other words: a real product manager.

It's not enough for PMs to throw around cliches like "I represent the customer" or "the product has to be built around customer needs" if they don't understand how to actually build and ship software.

Last year I dug into this and found it's not unusual. Many software companies hire smart people as CPO, Product Director, or Head of Product because they have leadership skills, people skills, and some knowledge of the industry. But most have little to no background in business, marketing, economics, or product development. Some companies go even further and promote an engineer with project management experience to Head of Product. And, of course, people in those roles tend to hire others who look like them, with similar experience. One day their CEO realiseS their product isn't selling, customers aren't happy, or engineers are left to figure out what to build.

To put it in perspective, imagine a company making a lawyer their Engineering Manager and asking them to build an engineering team. What are the chances they'd do better than a computer scientist or an actual engineer? Pretty slim. Sure, there are exceptions, but what usually happens is their engineers aren't motivated and complain about the lack of coaching, vision, purpose, and the poor quality of their tools, processes, code, and work environment.

Bottom line: companies need to audit product leadership roles as a priority and figure out who's really in charge of the product. Run an internal survey to check whether your CPO, Director, Head of Product, and Product Managers have studied business or have actual expertise in it. If not, you're in trouble.

Influencers without complacent viewers are not influencers. Just like dumb people being encouraged by other dumb people to commit a crime are simply criminals. Being an influencer has little to do with it.

Torturing someone to make money, or paying to watch it, is a crime. Police should act accordingly, seize the servers, retrieve the IP addresses, and arrest the criminals.

Intel hiring vibe coders and junior devs, nothing new here.

But Intel needs to fire a bunch of Engineering Managers and Directors ASAP. They're the ones replacing experienced devs with inexperienced ones to cut costs by 10x, with no plan in place to test security or product quality. Then they brag in leadership meetings about saving money by replacing their entire Python API team with two JavaScript devs.

Time to make those people accountable.

Timmy relies on patterns learned from huge amounts of text, so his answers are always relative and unpredictable.

Now AI companies are shifting how they talk about intelligence. They admit LLMs can't truly reason with the current architecture, so intelligence is being sold as the ability to solve problems using learned patterns, not actual reasoning. That's a big downgrade from the original dream of human-level thinking and AGI.

Still, I'm impressed with little Timmy and I know he will keep growing and getting smarter. But I don't see him solving climate change just yet.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44950485

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