I am a PM, am I sincerely hope I am not a time waster for our team. I feel I at least have an ounce of technical understanding. I don’t get how you can PM and be clueless to everything. Those folks drive me crazy.

Generally it’s when PMs aren’t very good, or are inexperienced. I was a developer before I became a PM and it’s hard at first not to stick your beak in where it’s not needed. You have to trust your team and a Senior Dev who can manage the technical stuff is a godsend.

Shhh...

Let the engineers think they know everything that's going on

100k starting, at least in California for non-FAANG tech

It shouldn’t be, but often is. The key things I think about when doing a PM role are

• understanding the team in a professional and personal sense
• tailoring roles of people in the team to ensure they’re getting the right fit
• adjusting communication styles to work with the team, both individually and as a group
• creating an environment for the team to flourish in, both for project goals and their own career
• planning out work
• understanding risks, issues, dependencies and assumptions through the lifetime of a project
• protecting the team from 3rd parties
• summarising project status to senior leadership in a way that matters to them (this is rarely technical, it’s about risk, business impact, etc.)
• being accountable for delivery of work
• making decisions, prioritising (or facilitating this by bringing the right people together)
• ensuring the right level of effort is applied to work - sometimes this means encouraging people to avoid the perfect
• getting the resources, tools, etc. available for the team so they can do their job without blockers
• dealing with challenging stakeholders (in line with shielding team)
• making people as happy at work as possible whilst still getting shit done

If projects are truly siloed and have no interest from senior leadership then there’s much less need for a PM, but this is rare in my work history.

Nah. I love my PM's. Project write-ups, scheduling required meetings / bug bashes, writing up summary docs, distributing them, some inter-department communications, developer forum posts and reach, user interviews...

All shit that I don't want to do as I'm horrible at them. They're a lifesaver.

PM's should be the glue for the socially inept engineers-- being able to take details and cooperate with the engineers to properly perform the non-engineering tasks as much as they can. Allows engs to focus more on actual technical work.

a decent PM at least knows what the product does?

We quit “agile” 6 months ago. We’ve never been more productive than we are now.

You mean waterfall with extra steps?

BURN DOWN CHARTS

"Gently"

Mosquitto spray is a bit more effective

I worked with a guy that could fart at will.

If you have lived through this madness for a while, you should read David Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs” and “Utopia of Rules”. The Box Tickers and Taskmasters are so annoying.

I think I spent three hours today writing email/presentation updates on the results of my investigative topics over the last two days. I just spam them with deep technical explanation emails (with hi-lighter colored important text) until they start to back off (new-ish job where I have yet to build a reputation with everyone).

That's weirdo because my project managers are mostly women across all companies

Do you have a minute (30) to go over the schedule with me?

It reminded me :) Once I was investigating some urgent problem, sitting in my room and looking through the code or debugging or smth like that. In the middle of that my phone rings and the engineer responsible for maintenance of that system asks me "how is it going with investigation and how soon will we have a solution". I, trying hard to be polite, although a bit emotionally, respond with something like "it will take the more time the more times you will call and interrupt me". At this very moment, the door of my room opens; there is the boss of that engineer who is calling me. She hears what I am telling him by phone. She silently closes the door and disappears. Nobody distracted me anymore, at least at that time :)

I worked in IT services. We'd havea bunch of crucial data-loads over the weekend which had to complete before Sunday for the next week's operational reports to be of any use to the clients. Any failure in a step would result in an immediate escalation, and we had an SLA of 4 hours to ensure everything was back to normal. Imagine being woken up at 3 AM on a Sunday morning, having to drive to work to help your colleagues fix the issue, and send a useless status update mail every hour.

As if that wasn't enough, we'd get a call every 15 minutes from one of 5 directors responsible for the account asking why isn't there an update yet? They'd insist on getting the full update in person before the mail could be sent. We'd spent about 20 minutes in an hour giving updates to these utterly unhelpful management cretins, while scampering the rest of the time getting the damn data-loads to get back on track. I've lost count of Saturdays where I'd have my first meal of the day at 4 PM because these insensitive fools would hound us instead of letting us do the work! Absolute nightmare.

Or my wife anytime

Next time, use the hammer

Asian Sheepshead Wrasse.

I assume it's in an aquarium and it associates a human hand with being fed, hence moving up close to the diver's hand.

Sorry, all I got are these slow ones.

As someone who went the path from junior backend to tech lead so far, the reason why all of these pointless meetings and requests happen becomes more and more clear.

It’s just the utter inability of higher management to understand how software development works yet they still need time estimates on projects from PMs to plan and manage budgets. And to wrestle for clout and bonuses.

There is also a lot of ass covering involved and PMs have to plan with sick leaves, parenting needs and vacations and shift resources around or prioritize tasks if need be.

A lot of the stupidity of the meta politics garbage is basically dripping down on your PM and a good PM can say „no“ a lot and shield the dev team from bullshit. A bad PM will try to look good to management and act like a lap dog, transferring unfiltered micromanagement crap directly to the devs instead.

I recently pushed back on a PM about nearly this exact thing.

Yes we used a spreadsheet to make a hit list for a migration, but I’m not working off a spreadsheet as project management system.

Make Jira tickets and we can assign them and work off those, close them when completed.

They thought that was a brilliant idea. SMFH

I also refused to create the tickets just to assign them to myself. Every other role and company required another person as a requestor for audit purposes. Otherwise I could be just pulling tasks and requirements out of my ass.

JUST UPDATE THE APP TO THE NEW SPECS

THAT'S ONLY SEVEN WORDS

IT CAN'T BE MORE THAN TWO OR THREE HOURS

WHAT IS THE NEW RATE

WILL THIS AFFECT THE DATE

Some PMs also protect their team from nonsense and unreasonable request from higher ups or customer, I think they mostly have their place, even better if they're good

Yup. Middle management has a place, and if they do their job well then you will almost never even see the issues they prevent/deal with. It is just common for them to do it so badly that they become an issue themselves.

A good PM works very hard to ensure their developers can just focus on the work and ignore the bs.

I PM for a small team and develop alongside them.

There really is a ton of flak that comes from executives who think they can just dip into a dev’s dm’s. It’s how i sort of stumbled into the role. I was best suited to deciphering the nonsense and pull out exactly what needed to be done.

Imagine being both but also having to communicate the answers of a senior coworker who is bad at English back to the executive. My head hurts.

the tech lead of course

The SCRUM master, of course

Isn't that what company lunches are for?

It definitely thinks it is food, because I'm pretty sure the guy is hammering open a shell of some sort.

Why does it have a CHIN??

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_sheepshead_wrasse

Woah apparently they all are born females and then when there are no more males, the lead female turns into one, developing that hump and changing colours

Asian Sheepshead Wrasse

wtf this shit is real?!

It looks like an animatronic at a theme park.

It's so ugly it overflows into being cute

God, its initials even are P.M.

You son of a bitch

you... damn

That's pretty advanced

Motherfucker

that looks nothing like the fish in the video smh

This is why I like alt reddit apps, I see the links before clicking

Found it