Why do people shit on product managers

While I agree that shitting on any role (PM in this case) is dumb, your statements on programming are ignorant and incorrect. It's more than maths and knowing languages, the same way being a PM is more than just gathering requirements and framing the product. I've been lucky to work with good ones so far

Hare Ram krishna prabhu ye kya hua!! Coding is like 2+2!! And that comparision with bilingual person!!

One reason could be and this is something that I’ve observed as well is that entry/mid level product managers are a bit apathetic towards devs/designers and knowingly or unknowingly insinuate that their. (Devs/designers) jobs are way easy than they think. Now, this may not necessarily be true for every org. but I’ve observed this first hand.

I think you’re trying to make a good points, but with the wrong analogies.

You’re right in saying that most engineers (coders) are overrated. Probably coz it’s extremely easy to be an average coder. You just need to be smart enough to know a language, read code and google well. We can build great things but ask us to explain why we did what we did and most of us will just mumble for a few minutes before saying that a blog post/stack overflow/OAI asked us to do it.

Product managers, on the other hand has more responsibility by definition, is a cross department stake holders and overall just has higher stakes. Some of the best engineers I’ve worked with transitioned to product roles.

To your original question on why people shit on PMs

1. Title is abused. People who manage just excel sheets and WAs groups are also called product managers.

2. It sounds easy. Everyone feels they could be a PM. It’s like SQL. Syntax is easy so you’ll always get answers but it requires a lot of skill to know if the answer is correct and what you did was optimised.

3. Shit ton of companies that shouldn’t exist have existed. All of them are solving problems no one cares about and product people have romanticised the whole thing with jargon like cohorts, AB, DAU, MAU, Retention. The list goes on. Obviously, these are all important things but they are used more for making it sound important than actually solving in most companies.

I'm sure whatever you "coded for 2 years" is nowhere close to what software engineering is. You should know the introductory python and c++ courses you took aren't what software engineers do in their job. I personally shit on some of the product managers in my department simply because they say stupid shit and clearly have no idea of what they're talking about. No hate for product management in general though.