> If deciding what to build is the hard part, why do so many product managers seem clueless?

I'm not sure I follow the logic here. Wouldn't this mean that product design is hard?

That said, yeah, coding is hard. I suspect that those who claim that coding is not hard are high-level ICs. For better or for worse, as the size of a company grows and as one's career progresses, engineers will often tranform to professional box drawers, expert meeting goers, seasoned report writers, fierce gatekeepers...Anything but deep coders. Over time, they lose touch of the actual building and think that any code can be handled by people under them.

People like Jeff Dean, who still codes and optimizes things like TPU kernel code, is very rare.