A big project with lots of people and moving parts that doesn’t need each individual tracking their own status and needs because the Project Manager is keeping everything up to date and keeping the Senior Managers off your back is invaluable.
Go Live was buttery smooth. We were all in and out by lunch, even after having to address a hang up on the fly.
Good project managers are worth their weight in gold
I’ve had, hands down, one of the worst project managers in the world. Hewas overly concerned with team politics and toxicly positive. His toxic positivity was the main reason in my opinion as to why we never delivered anything usable to the company and were eventually downsized. He had no vision at all for quick and frequent delivery… he was the wrong person for the job but consistently believed that he just needed to “do his best for the day” and sleep happy that night. Meanwhile, his team was boiling with frustration and wasted work hours for features requested by management on a whim — these usually end up fully forgotten by the time they are production ready. His biggest accomplishment is somewhat shielding his team from upper management… sometimes. He was such a bottle neck and our team was a net loss to the company except where they could advertise “using AI” in their products. If he had been removed, and we (his team) had to manage things ourselves with the stakeholders, we would have probably been able to deliver something worthwhile every quarter or so.
They’re supposed to work as an adaptor/buffer/filter between the technical side and the non-technical stakeholders (customers, middle/upper management) and doing some level of organising.
In my 2 and a half decades of experience (a lot of it as a freelancer, so I worked in a lot of companies of all sizes in a couple of countries), most aren’t at all good at it, and very few are very good at it.
Some are so bad that they actually amplify uncertainty and disorganisation by, every time they talk to a customer or higher up, totally changing the team’s direction and priorities.
Mind you, all positions have good professionals and bad professionals, the problem with project management is that a bad professional can screw a lot of work of a lot of people, whilst the damage done by, for example, a single bad programmer, tends to be much more contained and generally mainly impacts the programer him or herself (so that person is very much incentivised to improve).
Good project managers are invaluable. I’d much rather explain status to a sympathetic ear and have them reword it for diplomacy than try and directly advocate with executives - and I celebrate any customer communications I don’t have to be a party to.
When PMs act like part of the dev team and handle the communication side of the project it lets devs focus on the important shit… and if your PM is asking for daily updates then they’re too green (or you’re too unreliable) to have built up a good level of trust. Nobody fucking cares if a project is delivered at 3PM or 4PM, so who the fuck cares about daily or hourly project updates - the status won’t be materially different.
It’s like managers or fellow developers - good ones are invaluable and shitty ones make everyone’s lives harder… the difference is that PM seems to be a position that attracts do-nothing folks so it’s more likely you’ll get a shitty roll.
I don’t work in software, I’m a chemical (aka process) engineer.
Some project managers are superfluous if they don’t have a background being an engineer of some discipline themselves, but the vast majority I’ve worked with are excellent because they have a working knowledge of everything required to progress each stage of the project, and deal with most of the client interactions.
Being able to say: “we’ve done x, but we still need y, z and aa to progress” and then the project manager organising this getting done together with the other discipline leads is a godsend, letting you focus on doing the actual calculations/design/nitty-gritty details. And the fact they manage the annoying role of dealing with clients and the disagreements around that is also great.
This is working as a consultant, but I imagine if you replace clients with higher ups, I’d imagine the same still applies.
Perhaps things are very different in software, but I do think there is some use for them.
But I’ve never had one check up every 15 mins, more like once a day, and only if something is very time sensitive. Otherwise it’s once a week, or by email as required.
At my job, me and another guy were given stuff to work on. But unknown to product, there’s a lot of shared code there.
In my imagination, it should be someone’s job to coordinate this. Instead, I finished a chunk of mine, he finished a chunk of his, and then there was confusion. Maybe that’s just a technical team lead’s job.
Not only do I feel this in my soul, I’ve been working for almost 13 years, and to this day, I’m still not sure what a project manager contributes.
The only thing I can tell is that their job is to be the designated impatient person.
They are there for higher ups to bitch at in toxic orgs. Thats why they pester constantly; noone wanta to be bitched at.
A big project with lots of people and moving parts that doesn’t need each individual tracking their own status and needs because the Project Manager is keeping everything up to date and keeping the Senior Managers off your back is invaluable.
Go Live was buttery smooth. We were all in and out by lunch, even after having to address a hang up on the fly.
Good project managers are worth their weight in gold
I’ve had, hands down, one of the worst project managers in the world. Hewas overly concerned with team politics and toxicly positive. His toxic positivity was the main reason in my opinion as to why we never delivered anything usable to the company and were eventually downsized. He had no vision at all for quick and frequent delivery… he was the wrong person for the job but consistently believed that he just needed to “do his best for the day” and sleep happy that night. Meanwhile, his team was boiling with frustration and wasted work hours for features requested by management on a whim — these usually end up fully forgotten by the time they are production ready. His biggest accomplishment is somewhat shielding his team from upper management… sometimes. He was such a bottle neck and our team was a net loss to the company except where they could advertise “using AI” in their products. If he had been removed, and we (his team) had to manage things ourselves with the stakeholders, we would have probably been able to deliver something worthwhile every quarter or so.
They’re supposed to work as an adaptor/buffer/filter between the technical side and the non-technical stakeholders (customers, middle/upper management) and doing some level of organising.
In my 2 and a half decades of experience (a lot of it as a freelancer, so I worked in a lot of companies of all sizes in a couple of countries), most aren’t at all good at it, and very few are very good at it.
Some are so bad that they actually amplify uncertainty and disorganisation by, every time they talk to a customer or higher up, totally changing the team’s direction and priorities.
Mind you, all positions have good professionals and bad professionals, the problem with project management is that a bad professional can screw a lot of work of a lot of people, whilst the damage done by, for example, a single bad programmer, tends to be much more contained and generally mainly impacts the programer him or herself (so that person is very much incentivised to improve).
Good project managers are invaluable. I’d much rather explain status to a sympathetic ear and have them reword it for diplomacy than try and directly advocate with executives - and I celebrate any customer communications I don’t have to be a party to.
When PMs act like part of the dev team and handle the communication side of the project it lets devs focus on the important shit… and if your PM is asking for daily updates then they’re too green (or you’re too unreliable) to have built up a good level of trust. Nobody fucking cares if a project is delivered at 3PM or 4PM, so who the fuck cares about daily or hourly project updates - the status won’t be materially different.
It’s like managers or fellow developers - good ones are invaluable and shitty ones make everyone’s lives harder… the difference is that PM seems to be a position that attracts do-nothing folks so it’s more likely you’ll get a shitty roll.
They are the ones that talk to the customers so the engineers don’t have to.
Often those customers are others in the same company.
I don’t work in software, I’m a chemical (aka process) engineer.
Some project managers are superfluous if they don’t have a background being an engineer of some discipline themselves, but the vast majority I’ve worked with are excellent because they have a working knowledge of everything required to progress each stage of the project, and deal with most of the client interactions.
Being able to say: “we’ve done x, but we still need y, z and aa to progress” and then the project manager organising this getting done together with the other discipline leads is a godsend, letting you focus on doing the actual calculations/design/nitty-gritty details. And the fact they manage the annoying role of dealing with clients and the disagreements around that is also great.
This is working as a consultant, but I imagine if you replace clients with higher ups, I’d imagine the same still applies.
Perhaps things are very different in software, but I do think there is some use for them.
But I’ve never had one check up every 15 mins, more like once a day, and only if something is very time sensitive. Otherwise it’s once a week, or by email as required.
At my job, me and another guy were given stuff to work on. But unknown to product, there’s a lot of shared code there.
In my imagination, it should be someone’s job to coordinate this. Instead, I finished a chunk of mine, he finished a chunk of his, and then there was confusion. Maybe that’s just a technical team lead’s job.
They’re technically there to ensure the project has the correct resources aligned, and manage the project budget.
Aka if they want timely updates, they can purchase & fetch me coffee! I don’t need them, but they sure as hell need me.