Both project managers at my company quit at the same time. Rather than replace the PMs, my employers are having us engineers figure out what customers want and all the dates. It’s super hard! Yesterday I sat through an hour-long meeting for a project that never needed to happen… while my other projects are late.
So it turns out those guys were actually doing a lot of work, and spreading it out (to people who suck at it) was not a good idea. I actually enjoyed my job before this, and it’s starting to feel like time for a change. In my experience it never gets better and you should always jump ship sooner rather than later.
A good project manager is generally worth a couple of bodies they’re helping manage. Unless your teams are all comprised of Superstars, they get more done with less.
Pm is the worst because in my experience you not only have to keep track of every little detail you also usually have to hold the customers hand through the process and if you’re not experienced in doing that can create a lot of headaches.
Absolutely! But it also depends on the size of the company. Small companies can absolutely benefit from PMs. I used to take freelance clients as a engineer, and never accepted a job without a PM who was willing to block out the noise.
In big companies though, I have a lot of disdain for PMs.
Many literally spend their hours being the middleman between actual stakeholders. I recently had a project where the PM was just forwarding emails from one department lead to another. They didn’t understand the product or cared to follow any processes. Then distracting my team for status updates so they can build reports in Excel, so they can feed it up the chain if something was done or not.
Fortunately, our retros are heavily engineer-centric and we can give harsh feedback/fire our PMs, which we have done successfully over the past few years.
Both project managers at my company quit at the same time. Rather than replace the PMs, my employers are having us engineers figure out what customers want and all the dates. It’s super hard! Yesterday I sat through an hour-long meeting for a project that never needed to happen… while my other projects are late.
So it turns out those guys were actually doing a lot of work, and spreading it out (to people who suck at it) was not a good idea. I actually enjoyed my job before this, and it’s starting to feel like time for a change. In my experience it never gets better and you should always jump ship sooner rather than later.
A good project manager is generally worth a couple of bodies they’re helping manage. Unless your teams are all comprised of Superstars, they get more done with less.
Pm is the worst because in my experience you not only have to keep track of every little detail you also usually have to hold the customers hand through the process and if you’re not experienced in doing that can create a lot of headaches.
I also just really dislike pointless meetings.
Absolutely! But it also depends on the size of the company. Small companies can absolutely benefit from PMs. I used to take freelance clients as a engineer, and never accepted a job without a PM who was willing to block out the noise.
In big companies though, I have a lot of disdain for PMs.
Many literally spend their hours being the middleman between actual stakeholders. I recently had a project where the PM was just forwarding emails from one department lead to another. They didn’t understand the product or cared to follow any processes. Then distracting my team for status updates so they can build reports in Excel, so they can feed it up the chain if something was done or not.
Fortunately, our retros are heavily engineer-centric and we can give harsh feedback/fire our PMs, which we have done successfully over the past few years.