Hmmm. That's an understandable perspective, but I don't think that splitting things up between product and engineering is of much benefit or interest to the end user.
So says a former VP of product design who spent 14 years at Facebook. Say what you will about Facebook, I'm sure she learned a lot about product design at that FAANG, as well as at Stanford and the startups since.
But guess what. The average person isn't going to want to build every piece of software they use. And if they do want to build it, they sure as heck won't want to maintain it.
I saw a colleague build a custom marketing workflow a few months ago using AI. It was cool, but I thought to myself "welcome to the world of software debugging".
> If I have a team in pain and we need more people on it, or different people, I don't know if I can wait six months for the one person I want to hire to become available and willing. Sometimes, you gotta go with who is available.
I think the point is that you should be building your network of folks before you need them. And that you should go to your network with a specific ask rather than "who is a good engineer?".
Related, slightly: I had a business idea a few years ago when things were tighter for engineers to build a system that collected interested engineers email addresses and send them content about what the company was building. Basically a drip campaign tool for engineering talent rather than sales. I still think this would work for a company that was hiring regularly but that wasn't sexy enough to have name recognition.
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