Your PM should be the first to be worried, honestly. I keep hearing people describing their job as "I just click around on Jira while I sit through meetings all day."
That's a bad PM then to be honest. I think ChatGPT will definetly commodify a lot of "bitch work" (pardon my french).
The PMs who are only writing tickets and not participating in actively building ACs or communicating cross functionally are screwed. But so are SWEs who are doing the bare minimum of work.
The kinds of SWEs and PMs who concentrate on stuff higher in the value chain (like system design, product market fit, messaging, etc) will continue to be in demand and in fact find it much easier to get their jobs done.
To be fair to the people that I hear that from, they're essentially complaining about the worst part of their job. They're active participants in those meetings, they are genuinely thinking about the complexities of the mismatch between what management asks for and what their ICs can do, etc. I see their value. But the awful truth is that a $10k/project/yr license for PMaaS software will be very appealing to executives.
And as a Product Manager, I'd support that. Most PMs I see now in the industry are glorified Business Analysts who aren't providing value for the amount of money spent on them. But that's also true for a lot of SWEs and any role. Honestly, the tech industry just got very fat the past 5-7 years and we're just starting to see a correction.
edit with additional context:
Writing Jira tickets and making bullshit Powerpoints with graphs and metrics is to PMs as writing Unit Tests are to SWEs. It's work you need to get done, but it has very marginal value. When a PM is hired, they are hired to own the Product's Strategy and Ops - how do we bring it to market, who's the persona we are selling to, how do our competitors do stuff, what features do we need to prioritize based on industry or competitive pressures, etc.
That's the equivalent of a SWE thinking about how to architect a service to minimize downtime, or deciding which stack to use to minimize developer overhead, or actually building an MVP from scratch. To a SWE, while code is important, they are fundamentally being hired to translate business requests that a PM provides them
into an actionable product. Haskell, Rust, Python, Cobol - who gives a shit what the code is written in, just make a functional product that is maintainable for your team.
There are a lot of SWEs and PMs who don't have vision or the ability to see the bigger picture. And honestly, they aren't that different either - almost all SWEs and PMs I meet when to the same universities and did the same degrees. Half of Cal EECS majors become SWEs and the other half PMs based on my friend group (I didn't attend cal, but half my high school did, but this ratio was similar at my alma mater too, but with an additional 15% each entering Management Consulting and IB)
> Writing Jira tickets and making bullshit Powerpoints with graphs and metrics is to PMs as writing Unit Tests are to SWEs. It's work you need to get done, but it has very marginal value.
Don't want to be rude but I don't think you know what you're talking about. And this is coming from a person who most certainly doesn't like sitting on writing Unit Tests.
I think this will probably be a boon to the project manager. It will be another tool and their toolbox along with real developers that they can assign lower complexity tasks too. at least it's till it's capable of doing high complexity stuff.
Project managers are dealing with the high complexity stuff, while the developers are handling the low complexity stuff? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
