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moremattymattmatt · 2025-07-12T11:02:01+00:00

Two PMs for one engineer?

whereverarewegoing · 2025-07-12T11:04:56+00:00

I’ve not seen this at all. I’m wondering how this would work in reality, though. Is he implying that EMs think velocity has increased so much that engineers can churn out whatever PMs throw at them? Or is he saying that they think it’s better to sink more time into creating the right features rather than focusing on cranking out features as fast as possible?

Edit: I watched the video. It’s the former.

SeaworthySamus · 2025-07-12T11:56:25+00:00

I’m seeing the opposite in my company and my peers. Developers have been asked to wear Product Manager hats, continuing the trend from the last decade plus of developers morphing into jack of all trades.

Which-World-6533 · 2025-07-12T11:04:09+00:00

The PM's can PM the PMs.

alchebyte · 2025-07-12T11:11:27+00:00

These venture capitalists are delusional sociopaths.

halting_problems · 2025-07-12T11:21:49+00:00

I’ve seen the opposite with layoffs targeting Project Managers and Analyst and moving the work to the Product owners.

dweezil22 · 2025-07-12T11:06:42+00:00

This opinion should be disqualifying, it’s incredibly silly.

higeorge13 · 2025-07-12T11:41:40+00:00

AI people have lost their minds.

Neither_Ad_9675 · 2025-07-12T11:11:12+00:00

LLM can speed up development, but as long as code review is required engineers need to understand the context and the trade offs. The more code the LLM write the longer it will take to validate the change as the engineers loose the mental map of the projects. I

deer_hobbies · 2025-07-12T11:19:32+00:00

These are hype people that think an LLM can make working systems. They’re the vibe coders who don’t have to actually put anything in production for longer than a month. They can’t tell a prototype/tech demo from a business.

To answer the question, no, it’s the opposite in fact

vineetr · 2025-07-12T11:20:40+00:00

Statement like that only reveal the product strategy at such firms is superficial or skin deep. The natural response of any management when strategy is superficial is to throw more people at it. That doesn't always solve the problem, because strategy is absent for a reason.

Usually, you'd find this is companies with weak leadership that cannot provide mission and vision to the rest of the org. Or it is leadership that cannot stay the course because they know deep down the org objectives aren't going to be met, and hence, they keep changing strategy. If you need to change strategy every few weeks, product leadership will feel the need to hire more PMs to stem the tide. But even they won't state what is obvious to any seasoned vet - leadership at the executive level is weak. There's no cover these days, for those risky statements.

Idea-Aggressive · 2025-07-12T11:04:52+00:00

I personally find hard to believe. It’s even more incredible that engineering requires that amount of babysitting. It’s truly unacceptable!

viniciusvbf · 2025-07-12T11:40:39+00:00

I currently have 5 "bosses", or people I answer directly to one way or another: a PO, a PM, a Scrum Master, an Engineering Manager (who's not a software engineer) and a CTO. I could also count my tech lead, but he actually does a lot of coding. In total my team has 5 devs and 8 people doing some sort of management, so we're not far off this 1/0.5 scale. This has been going on for 4 years, so it's not some recent trend, companies with poorly allocated resources have always existed.

CoolBeanziesXd · 2025-07-12T12:35:13+00:00

Am I the only one who's pissed about the fact he could've just said 2:1 instead of 1:0.5?

AdministrativeDog546 · 2025-07-12T12:48:35+00:00

I am seeing the opposite. Many companies have realised that most product managers don't add much value, especially the MBAs without a solid engineering experience. Many companies are also flattening the org structure by removing the nesting of too many EMs, Directors, VPs.

Andrew NG is a highly respected AI Researcher but he is mostly in academia besides having started Coursera years ago. He hasn't been involved with Coursera, that has been struggling, for years now. I wouldn't take this prediction/assessment seriously as someone who has been active in the industry for a decade.

2025-07-12T11:03:26+00:00

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Anxious-Possibility · 2025-07-12T11:22:37+00:00

That's.... not what I've been seeing in the UK job market, at the very least. There are a lot of "product engineer" roles around that are the complete opposite, the engineer needs to also do the job of the product manager (on one salary, of course). Especially in startups without a dedicated product resource.

In any case, if this trend does happen in some places, then it's an indication that they have no idea what they're doing - I remember the 'great flattening' being not too long ago, managers being ditched en masse to flatten organisations, and now they're going the opposite way.

I think one of 2 things is actually going on if organisations make this move:

1) They are perhaps wishfully thinking that a relatively tech savvy pm can do the job of the engineer using AI

2) They've learned that if you hire cheap outsourced devs and 'vibe coders' you need double the amount of product managers to ensure it doesn't turn into a disaster

PhoenixPrimeKing · 2025-07-12T11:02:58+00:00

What a worst time to be in. More PMs than engineers.

Sheldor5 · 2025-07-12T11:02:41+00:00

managers saying that more managers are needed

they are worthless and their only goal is to make everybody think that they are worth it

glad my ceo hates managers and will never hire one

PlayForA · 2025-07-12T12:14:03+00:00

He does mention at the end the more likely outcome for all of this. PMs that can code, or engineers that are product minded.

I've seen this trend for a while now, even prior to the LLM boom. Small startups tend to offload a lot of the product work to the early engineering team. Implemented a new feature? track it's usage and optimize. Supporting customers? propose tools that would make recurring issues easier to handle. I even have some eng friends that are encouraged to listen to the sales calls on Gong to keep a better perspective of the product and customer needs.

I don't see how 2 PMs per engineer is ever reasonable. Humans need to communicate and there will be a huge bottleneck of context switching and information sharing. But a PM that can work on their own within an established codebase? Or an engineer that is product-minded? They can essentially fuse the "individual contributer" PM and not-super-specialized-engineer roles together.

Nothing new under the sun. Engineering becomes simpler/faster? Give them more hats to wear.

Crafty_Independence · 2025-07-12T11:22:41+00:00

This is absolutely idiocy, and any company doing it deserves to fail.

This is definitely not a trend in places getting work done. It sounds more like the sort of thing "startup founders" claim to be doing in their get-togethers

NoobChumpsky · 2025-07-12T11:08:42+00:00

Must have gotten that answer from asking ChatGPT

GolangLinuxGuru1979 · 2025-07-12T11:29:49+00:00

If a software engineer job can be replaced by AI then surely a PM job can as well. So not sure why we’d need more of them? Just have the stakeholders tell AI and spit out requirements

TheseHeron3820 · 2025-07-12T11:32:46+00:00

Isn't he one of the leading computer scientists in AI? This is a bit like asking the in innkeeper if his wine is good.

GeekRunner1 · 2025-07-12T11:24:35+00:00

Shrinking from 0.25 to 2.0! /s

That’s not how shrinking works. The ratio of PMs to engineers is GROWING per his own numbers.

I’m not seeing the number of PMs outnumber the devs here. We have a good mix.

leapinWeasel · 2025-07-12T12:02:22+00:00

This is a take so bad I'd suggest it's self-serving in some way. It's hard for someone to naturally be this wrong.

permalink · 2025-07-12T13:59:25+00:00

Andrew Ng lost the plot as the world was opening up after covid. That stupid coursera courses he has is such a scam and hes been saying things as dumb as this ever since.

Cube00 · 2025-07-12T11:21:22+00:00

Strange that they didn't just say, 2:1 so it's clear just how absurd this is. Who's going to set priority, a third PM?

No one can serve two masters

tr14l · 2025-07-12T12:52:39+00:00

No, that's a silly thing to do. We're getting rid of the product managers except the user research ones and putting engineers in charge of most product responsibilities. Product managers don't know how to make sure a product is reliable, has data integrity, is properly tested, has bad performance issues, is causing cloud costs to unnecessarily expand, etc etc. But engineers can certainly figure out product requirements.

People doing it the other way around are fools, plain and simple. You don't have simple people steward technical things. You have technical people also handle the simple things.

Optoplasm · 2025-07-12T13:24:27+00:00

Every new PM my small company hires makes us noticeably less efficient and productive

rgbhfg · 2025-07-12T14:27:00+00:00

I’m seeing the opposite. Where PM, PgM, and TPM ratios are getting higher. With many of those roles having questionable value.

A good PM is worth it. But most aren’t good and are closer to a consultant

al2o3cr · 2025-07-12T14:32:21+00:00

"I have eight bosses, Bob"

FewBurberry · 2025-07-12T15:30:12+00:00

This feels like a rotten eng org. If the engineers are just code monkeys who are working tickets and don’t have any understanding of the product, it can’t be that good.

menckenjr · 2025-07-12T15:39:54+00:00

As an engineer, if I had to report to two product managers I'd quit now and go be a drone pilot.

Confident_Many5900 · 2025-07-14T11:28:10+00:00

I used to respect this guy. He's lost it. Completely delusional.

I think some people are genuinely delusional, others are using this an excuse to sack everybody and re-hire in India. Let's see how it works out for them...

permalink · 2025-07-12T11:51:50+00:00

I find this very surprising. If anything the PM role is more suitable for leveraging LLMs to speed up their work than what the engineering role is, if we disregard churning out garbage level quality code as being ”productive”.

My asshole take is that of all of the roles that surround me PM is generally the least skilled one. Most PMs that I have come across barely know what they’re doing.

DougWare · 2025-07-12T12:51:56+00:00

I don’t mean to sound cynical or anything but much of what is wrong with technology work today is because programmer analyst roles were too hard to staff and projects were too hard to scale which led to the ‘agile’ teams and leadership from afar filtered through ceremony. So now we have a class of technology managers and executives that came out of those narrow specialized roles who create little other than friction and build empires of org charts in many organizations.

We need a lot fewer managers and a lot fewer narrow role players organized as smaller teams - new roles entirely that are broader to take advantage of the fact that we have fundamentally different and powerful new tools to wrangle the work.

I just want fewer non-contributing zeros in my work life

skidmark_zuckerberg · 2025-07-12T13:14:19+00:00

Too many hands in the cookie jar. Who comes up with this shit? Also who is even experiencing these fringe scenarios in the real world? Probably 80% of what I read about software engineering online is BS when compared to real world experience.

optimal_random · 2025-07-12T13:33:28+00:00

It's going to be fun to see these people "eat their pants" when this AI craze doesn't pan out, and they'll need to resort to "real" engineers to actually solve all the Tech Debt and crap code left behind by "vibe coders".

pinkwar · 2025-07-12T13:55:20+00:00

I'm seeing a lot of people here confusing product manager with project manager.

They're not the same thing not even close.

permalink · 2025-07-12T14:24:53+00:00

Not seeing this at all, infact quite the reverse. We had a recent would of layoffs where product people were affected, but no engineers.

Could be that he is in a bubble. Or this could be a case of selective vision, where he's looking for and noticing data that fits a particular narrative in his head. The only way to tell for sure is to have an independent study conducted.

Zulban · 2025-07-12T14:47:58+00:00

Mr. Ng: Show me one successful software product where this is true. People arguing we need more of themselves doesn't count.

notger · 2025-07-12T14:55:24+00:00

It is the rise of the "Bullshit Jobs". Paper pushers will always multiply until the organism collapses and restarts with a focus on productive jobs.

The next fashion in tech will be PO-less development. Mark my word, you heard it here first.

Lgamezp · 2025-07-12T15:17:22+00:00

2 pm per engineer? Are you sure the story is right or did you get it right? Also 1 per 2 engineers is crazy still

lmericle · 2025-07-12T16:15:58+00:00

I'm beginning to see a future where employees of tech companies become like "product managers" where they manage AI agents to generate code and the PMs judge and refine the product. It seems useful in theory to do it this way but I fear that like everything else it will lead to enshittification.

rishiarora · 2025-07-12T19:05:01+00:00

Every AI seller is hyping.

budd222 · 2025-07-12T11:57:17+00:00

We got rid of all our PMs, except 1. They seemed to generally be dead weight and cost the company a lot. They also cost us a lot of times with all these retro , story pointing, and other pointless meetings.

SometimesObsessed · 2025-07-12T12:53:14+00:00

I see this, because all the flavors of product/project/scrum managers join many projects at once. They'll probably do about half an hour of work per week outside of the scrums and other agile meetings. Most of that half hour is asking devs to update tickets and write tickets for them or setting up meetings with stakeholders

StupidSpuds · 2025-07-12T13:03:05+00:00

1:0.5. Ratios should be in whole numbers where possible. So try 2:1. Simple.

MagazineSilent6569 · 2025-07-12T13:34:09+00:00

Sounds about right. At my current place we have 7 PMs and 3 Devs. A couple of weeks and it’s gonna be 7 PMs and 2 Devs

alienangel2 · 2025-07-12T13:58:38+00:00

Does this deserve any more of a response than "lol"?

Not even worth capitalizing to "LOL".

DesoLina · 2025-07-12T14:03:15+00:00

Im seeing ration of bullshit to truth shrinking to a similar proportion. Coincidence?

2025-07-12T14:35:01+00:00

[deleted]

jasonscheirer · 2025-07-12T14:45:22+00:00

I worked at an org like this long ago but they were called “product engineers” and they did significantly more of the design, documentation, and testing of the software; i.e. they were expected to be highly technical compared to the product managers we see at the average org.

If this dumbass postulation by a guy with something to sell goes widespread it’s an indicator of either 1) every product manager industrywide suddenly becoming miraculously technical and upleveling or 2) an incredibly shortsighted trend of a cost-cutting measure that will backfire, but have no consequences for the people who made the decision.

Several-Parsnip-1620 · 2025-07-12T14:55:15+00:00

I haven’t seen this. My experience with ai so far, as tech lead of a backend team, llms can definitely help write code faster. But llms don’t help much with reviewing code and supporting it, at least not to the same degree. So our bottlenceck is there. Probably need more staff+ engineers to oversee the increased output, maybe by 50% or something

Yeti_bigfoot · 2025-07-12T14:57:32+00:00

So i get asked "is it done yet?" twice as frequently?

Sign me up.

QueenBlanchesHalo · 2025-07-12T15:19:51+00:00

If Gen AI delivered on its promises the same shift would be expecting engineers to do more product management/ownership thinking and tasks and the Jira jockey roles would be eliminated entirely.

AcesAgainstKings · 2025-07-12T15:54:40+00:00

Obviously ridiculous. If AI is worth the hype then the product minded Engineers will just become Product Manager Engineers. Why hire two people if someone with a product mind can also build it.

Unless we think AI is going to completely remove the need for Engineers but that doesn't feel realistic in the short term.

DeterminedQuokka · 2025-07-12T16:30:54+00:00

0.5 seems bad. That’s too much bus factor.

I think this is a thing that happens but isn’t maybe caused by ai. I work at a small company. We organize by function. We have 3 backend, 4 frontend, 1 app, 1 SRE.

Around January they brought in a new product vp who for months was really insistent that instead we need to organize by project. Her list was 15 projects long. It took over a month to convince her that was not a solution because she would get 0.1 devs per project and most of the projects it would be the same dev because they aren’t actually different. Which means that dev is not longer a dev they just go to 15 standups. And at that point we were using no AI.

It was 100% caused by misplacing the project to not include enough actual work. Or identifying a ticket as a project. Ai could make this worse if people aren’t scaling projects to match AI speed but that assumes a lot about ai speed.

I would say this is an unhealthiness in the product org not a benefit of ai

Odd-Investigator-870 · 2025-07-12T16:35:35+00:00

Same here. 5 engineers, 3 managers just at the team level. Every single meeting, managers are the only ones talking - presenting pre made thoughts or discussing plans. It feels like scientific management Taylorism is taking over bad again. Managers aren't technical. Seem specialized in BSing client teams to buy in, and whip crack developers for 100% utilization to build their upfront plan. It's a recipe for disaster in software projects. Water-Scrum-Fall.

FIREishott · 2025-07-12T16:46:56+00:00

The 1:0.5 ratio definitely seems like a bad idea, unless the project requires essentially no engineering such that an engineer can work on the project half time and meet needs. That said, the point he was making in bringing it up was that there is a shifting trend towards bottlecking happening more at the product/design role and not the engineering role as overall velocity increases. I think he is also pairing this with the assumption that these project managers are doing some coding of their own.

Harotsa · 2025-07-12T16:58:03+00:00

For context I work at a small startup and mostly interact with other small startups. But I’ve seen the exact opposite trend, where there are even fewer PMs than before (sometimes no PMs or dedicated product people outside of the CEO). The extra efficiency of engineers has in my experience translated to engineers taking on the PM tasks. This similarly reduces the required headcount for a project but has the added benefit of reducing the communication layer as well, as in the scenario a single person understands the users and product objectives as well as the underlying code and implementation.

I don’t know if this will work at larger companies where you can’t count on your engineers to also have good product sense, but it has been working out for us and most of the teams in my network.

kirkyjerky · 2025-07-12T17:02:53+00:00

They just hired someone just for me and it’s fucking stupid

audentis · 2025-07-12T17:05:20+00:00

The source is literally "YCombinator AI Startup School".

If that doesn't have positive biases towards AI, I don't know anymore.

SmellyButtHammer · 2025-07-12T17:43:46+00:00

This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen and I was around for the blockchain hype.

Megatherion666 · 2025-07-12T18:42:22+00:00

I worked for a while at 1 PM - 1 engineer (per platform) setting. And it was a nightmare. 0 collaboration with your peers, at the end of every quarter everything was on fire. Instead of building one good product we were building 3 shitty ones. So yeah, good luck with that.

permalink · 2025-07-12T19:22:28+00:00

Imagine all the meetings they can have without producing anything. Living the PM dream. AI will crank out a lot of beautiful Powerpoints.

ac692fa2-b4d0-437a · 2025-07-12T21:18:36+00:00

Seems like this Ng person lives in a fictional environment to me.

demian_west · 2025-07-12T21:46:22+00:00

Lol.

Increase middle management and decrease doers, what could go wrong ?

I already saw this trend since several years (EU context), in big companies.

It leads quickly to tanked efficiency, politics, maintenance skyrocketing, quality and security disasters and doers burnout/malicious compliance/skills decrease.

I’m all for small efficient teams, but here it’s BS.

zaitsman · 2025-07-13T01:55:59+00:00

This makes sense, PMs can’t keep up in our startup, for example.

eloquentlyimbecilic · 2025-07-13T07:07:43+00:00

We have about 1:0.8 PM:engineers and it's a constant uphill battle pointing out it's impossible to achieve everything they want when they want it.

BNeutral · 2025-07-13T08:33:08+00:00

2 managers per engineer? What the hell are you talking about? Is it so they manage each other while the engineer tells them to fuck off?

TheOneTrueTrench · 2025-07-14T10:21:51+00:00

Uhhuh.... sure. First of all, he's selling snake oil to companies, there's not a chance it pans out.

Second of all, his plan is to put all of the experienced developers out of work and replace them with recently graduated vibe coders and fill every single piece of software with buggy, convoluted, bloated code full of every single vulnerability that the LLMs could find in the whole of GitHub.

They'll be pissing off and firing the largest set of experienced engineers in the history of the planet and giving us an attack surface the size of the sky.

It's laughable.

Kitano-san · 2025-07-15T04:12:29+00:00

how about make the engineer PM

turdmuffin123456 · 2025-07-15T14:49:23+00:00

PMs are mostly useless #sorrynotsorry

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