Comment by sanderjd
3 hours ago
The skill isn't "prompting", it is figuring out what to do, validating that it works the way you want, and thinking about how to best support future iterations of things you might want to do.
Which, not coincidentally, is pretty much the same description as what the job was already about.
I know, but even given that I really don’t think it’s that hard, and certainly not as hard as regular pre-AI software engineering.
We all like to act like “the hard part was figuring out what we want”, but I don’t think I really buy that anymore. Even when I really half-ass Claude prompts, it still usually figures out what I want well enough, and when it doesn’t it usually does once I give it correction.
I think this actually gets at a big part of what is causing this existential crisis. You're right, I don't think it was ever true that "the hard part was figuring out what we want". I think there have always been two hard parts: 1. Figuring out what is useful, and 2. Implementing a useful thing well. The second of these has gotten a lot easier, which means the first has become more important. But software engineers have long had a tendency to underrate that first part and consider it easy. I have long perceived a (to me) baffling arrogance that product management is an easier and less important job than software engineering. But that was never an accurate perspective, imo. And now that the "implementing things" job has gotten easier and the "figuring out what to implement" job has become more important, people with this perspective are really being thrown for a loop.
Product management is indeed an important but at the same time not very hard job.
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What even is product management? Just saying what you'd like? That's like equating the person ordering their meal with the person who will create it.
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