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.
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.