> I'd say the average engineer would be much more capable of learning to be an average PM than vice versa.

It's a completely different skillset. Practice shows, that most Engineers simply do not want to be PMs or find out about that after making the change and regretting it.

I agree but my point stands, even if they don’t want to, an engineer at least has the precision of thought to specify how a product could work. Many PMs simply don’t have this, so asking them to become vibe coders is a hopeless waste of time.

I agree, the thought of some PMs building an actual system is absurd. They do not understand the details necessary.

But quite a few developers I know would also be absolutely hopeless as PMs. No people skills, no interest in strategy or the long term view, do not want to hear about end users.

PM = project manager in my world

I imagine you’re saying that as a software engineer :). As a manager of both software engineers and product managers, I think this view is a bit of a stretch.

Some software engineers would make good product managers, some product managers would make good software engineers, and the majority of both are best suited to their current job.

You're correct I've spent most time as a software engineer or a engineering manager. I actually started my career as a web designer though. I've also been effectively an active PM in roles where there was no formal product management funtion. I've also been a co-founder of a two person operation where I did all the product and tech, and my co-founder did all the biz and operations. Another startup I co-founded I was "CTO" but was effectively the number 2 in a 100 person company and had veto power over our first PM hire. I've also been part of a larger scaleup that was acquired in a scenario that left a number of folks orphaned, so for a while I was also managing a handful of designers, program managers, and an IT manager.

So yeah, I understand your point, and if I ran a cross-functional team like that I would hopefully hire well enough that I felt the same. So maybe to restate my thinking in a way that may be slightly less controversial: AI is eating a lot of the low-level mechanistic work that used to define being a software engineer, however I never believed that was where the value was for engineers anyway. While some PMs are incredible and would no doubt be able to get good at vibe coding, the majority in my 25 years experience do not have the patience to get to a precision of requirements which is absolutely still a requirement to get anything out of AI.

>I'd say the average engineer would be much more capable of learning to be an average PM than vice versa.

software engineers love to imagine that they have the only job you can't train yourself to do quickly, all evidence to the contrary.

I don't know how that relates to what I said, and it's certainly not something I believe. Personally I don't think any form of knowledge work can be learned quickly in 21st century, otherwise it would have been automated away already (well before the current wave of AI that further accelerates the trend). That goes for product management, design, operations, strategy equally to software engineering, data science any other technical disciplines.

It relates directly to what you said. You said you thought that it would be pretty easy to teach an engineer to be a project manager and pretty hard to teach a project manager to be an engineer. That is just exactly the kind of directionality I pointed out.

You're putting words in my mouth. Also, I was talking about Product Managers, there's a word of different between that role and Project Manager (or Program Manager).