This was what I thought when I was an angsty engineer in early 20's, and I guess what motivated me to become a PM, where I realized it wasn't true.
Doing the PM job well -- being rigorous about the product, its goals, its strategy, customers, how it interfaces with the external world, and figuring out how to distill that down internally to empower your team -- takes as much intellectual horsepower as engineering. I had to stop writing code every day to realize how deeply complex and interesting the non-code world can actually be. A good example is the passage in "Superpumped" about how Travis Kalanik validated the idea for Uber with deep research. It's not just bullshitting through meetings.
I think the issue though is that, unlike eng, there is no obvious intellectual "floor" for PMs (equivalent of fizzbuzz for programming), so you've probably dealt with lots of bad, lazy, incapable ones.
Doing the PM job well -- being rigorous about the product, its goals, its strategy, customers, how it interfaces with the external world, and figuring out how to distill that down internally to empower your team -- takes as much intellectual horsepower as engineering. I had to stop writing code every day to realize how deeply complex and interesting the non-code world can actually be. A good example is the passage in "Superpumped" about how Travis Kalanik validated the idea for Uber with deep research. It's not just bullshitting through meetings.
I think the issue though is that, unlike eng, there is no obvious intellectual "floor" for PMs (equivalent of fizzbuzz for programming), so you've probably dealt with lots of bad, lazy, incapable ones.