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Comment by booleandilemma | Hacker News Reader

We need a system that doesn’t require project managers, at least not as a full-time position.

I don’t think they’re all that necessary. I think they’re a byproduct of considering developers as high-functioning autists not capable of managing themselves, and we’re in an emperor’s new clothes scenario.

All of the PMs I’ve met have either been wholly non-technical, or they were allegedly technical 20 years ago and they have no understanding of modern technologies. Useless either way.

I think by getting rid of project managers, and the managers of project managers (who are even more disconnected from what’s going on) companies would save themselves a lot of money.

Senior developers could take on a management role. But that’s the key, they should be developers, not people who have a PMP certificate and don’t know what a compiler is.

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You have a massive misunderstanding of what PM's do, likely because you only ever see one half of their job when you're trying to explain how something works and they're not understanding why it's needed. Trust me, if you had to deal with the OTHER side of a PM's job (dealing with upper management and answering questions about why you're three weeks behind on deliverables without giving technical explanations to people that DEFINITELY have no clue) you'd very quickly decide that it's better to have a meat shield between your team that needs to get shit done and a corporate structure that wants nothing more than to shitcan all of you and outsource you all to India.

What you are saying is correct. But it also shows how dysfunctional a lot of management structures are. Not too long ago I had a few discussions with my VP and it was kind of shocking how little he knew about what’s going on at the ground level. The information he gets is quite distorted by all the levels of management in between.

Meat Shields work both ways -- it's also to shelter mgmt from the sausage making process and to keep clusterfucks from taking up the time of higher level resources and managers.

Protective Meat.

When you have a great project manager who is absolutely rocking it, its a dream. They are helpful inprojects where you lack face to face contact with lots of stakeholders.

Why would Project Manager need to be technical? I think you’re confusing what PM’s job responsibilities are.

> Why would Project Manager need to be technical?

If they're managing a technical project they better be technically inclined.

I'm sick of having PM's who have no tech chops calling shots for big ticket development items. An MBA doesn't mean you are capable of leading a team of engineers.

You can't manage a project if you have no idea about the effort and risk associated with each piece of work. A typical job for a PM is to negotiate solutions with a customer, in that case they need to estimate work items relatively accurately in real time to do a good job. Non technical PM's will either make up bullshit estimates and then pressure their developers to follow through or they will be very bad at fulfilling customer needs since they constantly need to verify everything with the devs.

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