By what metric is Reddit a startup?

Nobody wants to say it, but the only real distinction is the investors and the composition of those investor's portfolios.

When Tencent, Sequoia and Andreesen Horowitz are in the same room, its a startup, specifically a tech startup.

They could be selling hairgel with only a landing page for you to put your email address and it would be a tech startup. They'll make sure it is considered as much.

Revenue

Perhaps. I've heard that Reddit engineers still push features to production without PMs in the loop.

I have worked at Google and Amazon. I never required PMs to be in the loop for a feature launch at either of the two.

Having said that, both Google and Amazon has excellent PMs and there are teams that require PMs to be in the loop for a feature launch but it is not universal.

Really? Did you require any non-engineers to be in the loop before launching the features? Were these public facing changes?

Netflix barely had any PMs. Almost all Netflix features are pushed without a PM being involved in any way.

Depends on which part of the company you're talking about. The studio engineering side has many PMs.

My google team didn't even _have_ a PM for most of my tenure there.

That sounds awesome TBH. I hate Reddit, and think it's Orwellian, but smart engineers shouldn't have to slow down to appease PMs.

A good PM saves work for the team by shifting work away from from valueless investments. If a team is "slowing down to appease a PM" then that PM is worthless.

> A good PM saves work for the team by shifting work away from from valueless investments.

Knowing what’s valuable and what’s not is a function of being an employee. Designers and engineers should know where value exists.

If they need a PM to shift them away from valueless work, then I highly question their efficacy as an engineer. I also highly question that organization’s management structure and communication.

Can imagine PMs at a product focused HN like forum complaining about the opposite aka engineers spending time at the wrong places

I've managed enough PMs to know that's 100% true. It happens at work, in the open.

So do Netflix engineers. That says good culture to me.

Says the ex-Reddit employee :)