I don’t think there are many SFHs there.
3.5k Emeryville sounds reasonable. How’s the crime map?
Why are you asking me? I thought you know the area better and was hoping to get the scoop from you…don’t you own in West Oakland?
Your location is much more north, closer to Berkeley than West Oak. It’s walking distance to Berkeley Bowl.
You know Oakland be quite different one block from the next.
Yes that’s why I am looking at this; close to groceries and has free shuttle to BART. Maybe this can be a good rental for Berkeley students too…but I really don’t like tri-level homes 
Darn. This looks almost exactly like mine in West Oak. Are they built by the same builder or what?
You are moving in? Double masters is great.
History is full of cases where the best tech didn’t win though. Engineers don’t realize how critical the UI is and most importantly the ease of use. They tend to think too much like engineers which makes things difficult for normal people to use. That was the brilliance of Steve Jobs. Everything is intuitively easy to use. That’s what makes tech a mass market hit vs. something only geeks use.
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Engineers rule. PM sucks.
I think what you say is true, but a bad PM is worse than a bad eng. When PM count increases on a project, they tend to be blockers than enablers. I have seen how bad a PMs influence can be on the overall speed of a team, and I have worked both with a good and a bad PM. A good PM increased my speed many folds, a bad one blocked many many projects.
For the most part, i think my worry overall is most projects can work without a PM just fine.
When you have many PMs, someone has to put them into use (For some reason), so you see PMs involvement in places where they don’t really add value.
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Yes, the most productive companies have an engineer to PM ratio of 100:1. The only PM is the CEO himself. 
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Yes that makes a lot of sense. A lot of the best product managers become founders or even VCs nowadays rather than stay in the field of product. It’s also a field that burns really good people out if they’re not able to balance their lives. With all the attrition, it’s very hard to find a good, experienced PM. And it’s hard to evaluate them until they start anyway.
Actually, the best engineers became founders and VCs. PMs remain mediocre as PMs.
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Oh yeah, a bad PM can sink the whole team. That’s why good PMs make so much. I agree you need the right ratio. One of my friends went from a company with almost no PMs where they never launched a product, since it was never perfect enough for the engineers. He hired in with their direct competitor which had a ton of PMs, and launched garbage that engineering didn’t want to launch. Oddly, the second company was far more successful, since their main competitor wasn’t launching anything.
My last company completely lacked a PM org. Engineers made CRAZY f-ing decisions based on dream specs of the best of all competitor products combined. You know it’s terrible when we had a power supply 2-3x the power of our competitors, because no one wanted to design a cheap circuit of inductors to handle the rare high current demand. I shouldn’t be the one asking that question. I have used any of my EE degree stuff in YEARS.
The products ended up costing 25% more than any competitor product, and customers wouldn’t pay more for them. Supply chain ended up being the voice of reason in driving the cost down to a competitive level. I led a cost review where towards the end our head of HW engineering said, “Why would anyone buy our product? It costs so much more than the competitors, and the specs the customer cares about are the same.” That realization was my goal, but I obviously couldn’t start the meeting with that statement. Everyone would get defensive, and we’d go nowhere. Without good PM, you end up with those situations.
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Most engineers burn out by 40… look at this forum. Most are or were engineers. and most would rather be doing something else. Investing, flipping or FIRE
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That’s right. It’s a profession for you to make a quick buck. Do or die before you hit 40! Thank goodness I Fired before that age…
This is just so false that I’m not going to argue it. It’s like saying, investment bankers don’t go into VCs or private equity (they do.) It’s a well-trodden path.
They do but based on my experience, engineers are far more successful as founders.
Or they are pms with eng skills 
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An exceptional case is Reid Hoffman, a non-engineer who founded something big (LinkedIn).
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And Steve Jobs.
“Steve didn’t ever code,” writes Wozniak. “He wasn’t an engineer and he didn’t do any original design, but he was technical enough to alter and change and add to other designs.” This is a characteristic that we see referenced time and time again in Walter Isaacson’s biography on Jobs.Aug 29, 2013
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