Comment by dylanha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dylanha | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not the OP but I'm thinking of switching too. My reasons:

Often writing the code for microcontrollers can be overwhelming especially when it's full of bad style or I have to understand a new library. There is often a difficulty mismatch. I find myself hating my programming job for hours, only thinking about money.

I have never tried program management and honestly it sounds easier. I watch my bosses just ask me for time estimates then take credit when I succeed and blame me/fire me if I fail to deliver by that date. I want to put myself in such a favorable position. (Although if I own the company, I'm probably financially responsible for losses too)

Even if I get rejected 9/10 phone calls, is it worse than dealing with compiler errors and run time errors all day? How hard is it to talk to customers and relay it to developers?

It seems the only real hard part with management is 1) estimating the difficulty of tasks, 2) knowing if your programmers are really struggling or if they are just slacking off. 3) trying to extract ideas from customers who don't know what they want

While I'd never recommend staying a career that you hate, I'm not sure switching to a position you think is cruisy is a great idea either. That's a recipe for under performance and bad management.

It does sound like you've never worked with a good PM, I'm not sure if I have either as I do struggle a lot with what value they actually add to projects.

99% of the time its better for people to speak directly and not relay information through other (probably non technical) people.

Of course you do need to limit distractions but I think you can set expectations with people about what distractions do and how often they should distract you.

Also find that a lot of PMs try play power games, I really think they need a new job title like Project Coordinator or something that sounds a little less in charge.

Interesting to see this thread has a very mixed idea of what a PM is, a number of people mention things I'd expect as part of a sales or BA role. I wonder if this is part of the reason people find PMs useless is that no one really knows what they should be doing.

Don't forget that any position that deals directly with clients also takes the brunt of their wrath if they're unhappy. As a non-dev in a SaaS company, I was the primary point of contact for a number of clients and if anything went wrong, I was the first person to hear about it. Clients are not usually pleasant when something is broken or if their project is running late.

My advice is to not underestimate the toll that can take on you. Trying to convey the importance of a specific item for a client to a developer is difficult, too, particularly if the dev is already pretty busy.

It might be that you're better at the management side of things. But don't be tempted just by "grass is greener" thinking: Try to imagine that every job could be hard, that you jump in, discover you don't know what you're doing and you're under a lot of pressure to find a solution, to take action and write documents and schedule meetings and send emails. Will you be motivated to struggle and prevail? More motivated than your worst days in previous jobs? If your response to that is "bring it on," then the shift will be good.

I find this reply interesting, because as a developer I feel like #3 is pretty much the only hard thing I have to deal with: translating human intention, which is sometimes paradoxical, into code. It can be hard enough when it's your intention, it's even harder when it's someone else's, and can be a huge time sink when it's multiple someone else's. Corner cases especially, where there is no answer that can completely satisfy all the stakeholders, becomes a balancing act.

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