Project managers are essential for larger projects…
Please tell us what “essential things” they do.
Keep everyone, and I mean everyone including senior management and directors, on task, on track, and all pointing in the same direction.
Good ones keep scope creep in check, and make sure decisions made last week are adhered to today.
The problem is there are a lot of not great PM’s, and a lot of management that run roughshod over PM’s.
I think I might be a project manager. it’s not my job description, but a good amount of my time is spent coordinating client needs (software), company needs (money), management needs (reassurance) and developer needs (concise and complete design, and decisionmaking).
Normally there are 6 software projects on the go at any one time, all in various stages of production that I need to keep ticking over to prevent a backlog or a gap in work for the Devs.
I’m fortunate that my only supervisor is the owner of the company and he now trusts me enough to say “Do whatever gets the job done” and so I don’t get micromanaged or roadblocked on decisionmaking. I choose the Devs, the architecture, the design, the timeline, and the budget. I take a dictatorial attitude to the clients to force their nebulous and sometimes stupid ideas into a clean, detailed, and clearly defined box long before the Devs ever hear of it. I take a very hands-off approach with the Devs, giving them plenty of support, asking for their advice, accepting their limitations and a very quick yes/no/alt when they have questions or recommendations. I don’t micromanage them, but I do have a system that helps me identify problems with the delivery pipeline. They also know I’m excruciatingly thorough in my testing so between their own testing and mine, very few bugs make it to production.
As for my manager, he pops his head in maybe twice a week to give me updates on stuff but otherwise leaves me alone, and I take a very firm line with all of the other senior management and clients when it comes to adhering to the project development procedure, which I wrote. I have no fear of telling people no, or telling them that we stick to the procedure or no work commences. Maybe I’ll get fired for being a hardass to mgmt one day, but it’s been 4 years and I don’t think I will.
I keep detailed track of every involved party, every task, event, meeting, test and correspondence between me and any other involved person, but they don’t know that.
And if anything goes wrong with the project, it’s my fault. I’d never blame the Devs for not for seeing something that I should have foreseen, and I’d never blame the client for not providing information that I should have asked for and verified.
Sounds like you are a product manager / project manager! :D
Sounds like a pretty small company. But imagine that but with thousands of people who need to be aligned
venture capitalist
that’s not useless, that’s actively harmful
A Project Manager is someone who thinks nine women can deliver a baby in one month.
“Hellen, you were supposed to only do the left arm! What am I supposed to do with a whole baby!?”
A good PM will herd all the cats and attend all the meetings you don’t want to. They’re worth their weight in gold.
A bad PM will do none of the above and constantly drag you in to fight their fires. They’re worth their weight in, well, you know.
Note I’ve seen the “protecting me from a meeting” backfire so hard.
One time for lack of headcount I did a bit of double duty as project manager including executive meetings. Then management found a project manager and instead of knocking out my part of those meetings in like 5 minutes, I suddenly had generally hour long prep meetings so my new project manager would be confident enough to engage in whatever random topic the execs tended to go into. After a quarter they demanded I swap back in to do the meetings instead, which I was happy to do.
Also, those meetings are my best chance to cut through some confusion so I don’t end up with a mess of crap in the tracker.
As a PM who tries to not waste anyone’s time, thank you. I’ve had pushback before from people who don’t like to do the talking, but I would only call that person forward if it’s going to prevent a ton of headaches all around. Sometimes it’s difficult to explain that. Otherwise I have no problem being the punching bag on stage. It’s my job.
This may come as a surprise to some, but project managers exist outside of software as well.
Hold up. Projects exist outside of software?
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That was my title at the prototyping shop I worked for. Sounded more white collar than “foreman”.
I worked as an academic and supported and got funding for my programs for decades. I was a higher level GS employee for the feds and I ran new product development for a couple small to medium biotech firms. The last firm I worked for got bought by a giant multinational company which rhymes with Spargill. They changed the way we did things and suddenly, I had a “Project manager”, who didn’t know anything about the project I developed and managed. Nor did they do anything else I could figure out other than call me on the phone and ask what I was up to and how the projects, which I developed and was PI on were going. I swear to god I have no idea what these people did, but EVERYONE who was a scientist got at least one of these useless managers. And I can bet those “managers” got paid more than we did. Anyway, the only thing I could figure out was that project managers were positions given to people who couldn’t do any real science anymore but had played the game and needed a reward. So their reward was to call up people like me every once in a while and ask me how things were going. Were there EVER a more useless job I can’t imagine what it might be.
Man, gotta disagree here. There are deadweights under every job title. Had a pm that literally carried the team on her back, while simultaneously shielding us from bullshit from on high.
Yeah, my team actually has a mix of great, good, and replacement level PMs. The bad ones either get let go or moved elsewhere. It helps that we tend to draw them from the roles that would be on projects they’d manage and seem to compensate them well enough that we retain all the good ones.
If an org can’t find good PMs, the org needs to create them and pay them enough that they stick in the role. It’s not easy, but it’s not rocket science.
Nail on the head there. So many PMs are either outside the industry entirely or pulled from completely unrelated projects and it’s just a disaster.
There are definitely some amazing PMs, but I’ve met way more terrible PMs who don’t know shit about fuck and don’t care to learn than good PMs.
Acceptable ones aren’t too rare, that is, ones that don’t have negative productivity – depending on the industry and company politics, in some places it’s BS all the way down. Good ones are rare and stellar ones are unicorns as it’s a dual mastery thing: You have to be good at both the technical aspects, as well as the people aspect, and neither of those two can be mere talent, it needs to be talent and education. Judging by Alice Cecile, being a systems ecologist is the right overall qualification.
Unfortunately, you’re right about as much as the original meme is. At my current gig, I’ve worked with half a dozen PMs, and while the majority of them were (seemingly) sweet and nice people, at least half of them would struggle to pour piss out of a boot if you wrote instructions on the heel. Even with project templates and runbooks, we still regularly had to clean up after them because they didn’t do part of the project or expected us to work on stuff that wasn’t marked as being live yet.
I’ve definitely seen both extremes. It’s insane the difference a good PM makes, but they’re rare because of how much pressure they have to handle. It’s an ungrateful job.
I understand the sentiment, but I had the pleasure of working with a great PM on a high profile project in my company and it was really good. The more moving parts and stakeholders there are, the more you’re going to need someone to manage the stream of information, set expectations, keep the focus on the end goal. It was very good and I learned a lot from them.
Fuckin’ preach. I’ve worked with a single pm worth their salt, and they got driven out by the useless cunts that couldn’t MANAGE to get from their desk to a toilet without a meeting.
In my career most of the actually competent PMs actually got poached so we’re left with the scraps.
Mine is the incompetents blame the competents for THEIR fuckups, and the competent ones don’t put up with that shit.
In my experience it’s because the terrible PMs are happy to shift their blame onto someone else, whereas the proficient PMs don’t shy away from their mistakes. The good pm gets fired for taking someone else’s responsibility and the bad ones stay piling their shit onto others. Good PMs can’t survive.
I fucking hate comments defending PMs like “you hate PMs if you only worked with bad ones”
Fuck no, they’re the idea guys of tech, they’re useless. Their entire existence depends on engineers not giving enough fucks about the product. They’re the result or a broken team structure. They’re annoying and have no real skills, which is proven by their excitement about AI nowadays. Every PM I’ve came across is hyping up AI, most of them vibe coding, whatever the fuck that means.
They’re only useless if they legitimately suck at their job or don’t give a fuck.
A good project manager will go a long way to keeping things running smoothly.
If a project appears as if it doesn’t need a project manager, the project manager is probably doing a great job
Project managers keep me from committing acts of arson to our issue management system lmao
Ah ha ha ha hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah. Oh wait, you’re serious!?? ornery_chemist @mander.xyz English On the other hand a manager willing to yell at/stonewall the MBAs when they deliberately lie about misinterpret your recommendations and timelines is a godsend.
Who are you even replying to? What is this comment about?
It looks like you’re both laughing at @[email protected] but also quoting a different comment supporting his stance.
He’s having a stroke or something
The best PM I ever had was playing zone defense and just deflecting every possible thing that could disrupt the creative team. Let us cook for more than a sprint.
Bad ones are constantly coming up with new requests, mid-sprint adds, don’t really have answers, and create more blockers than they resolve.
This fairy tale still lives? Sheesh, some people really are dense. Like, neutron star kind of dense
My only gripe is when they act like they are technical instead of administrative.
As a software guy, I love this. People building and running software products don’t need project managers. We ned product owners/managers. It’s a product, it has users, it doesn’t have an end date.
People who think managers are useless have either likely only worked for good ones or bad ones. Good ones make it look so easy it looks like they do nothing.
Quite often when I’m managing the work floor if we have a good week I have almost nothing to do on fridays. Sometimes the staff make comments about it and I always say the same thing “If I’m scrambling on Friday, it means I fucked up on Wednesday and we’re all going to have a shitty Monday.”
