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Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

My issue with the two “PM”s I interact with the most:

Project managers basically do something that the devs, especially dev manager, can handle themselves. It seems like a leftover process for when software contracting was more common. There’s no reason a developer can’t just manage the Kanban board and write a quick report.

Product managers can be really good but in a lot of cases they just devolve into stakeholder management with poor/no vision. Because they talk to upper management a lot they can get a lot of credit for things they didn’t have a lot to do with, because they’re the visible face for it. This can sometimes lead to the Product org getting too big because they get promoted up to Director and now need 10-100 reports for something that only needs like 3 Product managers max. Then you’re in a really bad spot because you’re going to be bothered by PMs with small scope a lot about stupid shit

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I used to see things the way you do.

Then I actually ended up in the position where I took on the responsibilities of a Project Manager in the course of building a department. I see it much differently now having worn both those hats as a generalist. You're tracking two different sides of the same body of work, and there is solid value that a good project manager provides in terms of producing a meaningful skeletal specification on which more in depth technical analysis and work can be done.

In addition, not all devs are full on gung ho let me throw something out there that I know will be mostly wrong until the details get filled in by everyone else. As a PM, you're as much the Rock in a pot of Rock Soup as you are the guy in meetings all the time. I've had to eat a lot of humble pie since getting saddled with building a department. The challenge is as much making sure things are in the right place at the right time, defining what the right time is, and making sure to unblock people as they run into obstacles.

It's a completely different type of work from straight up technical work, and is fundamentally destructive to maintaining the fine grained technical context you need to accurately implement something. You don't want to have to do it all at the same time.

Your experience meshes with mine perfectly.

Especially this is key: > The challenge is as much making sure things are in the right place at the right time, defining what the right time is, and making sure to unblock people as they run into obstacles

> It's a completely different type of work from straight up technical work, and is fundamentally destructive to maintaining the fine grained technical context you need to accurately implement something.

Exactly! Thank you for putting this so succinctly.

Just being aware of what needs to be done and in what order is critical. For that you need a bird's eye view of all relevant pieces, which is almost impossible to do when you are in the weeds.

project manager are there to free devs mind from various distractions.

I'm glad I can delegate them the reasoning about which task is more urgent, and them acting as buffer to clients frees me from a lot of time trying to understand what they want, how they want it and all the back and forth about how much they want to pay for it.

good project managers, that aren't just bossing internal people around but working with the team at different part of the projects like communication and operations, are rare, but are a joy to work with.

Project managers are very useful when there are clients and budgets to deal with, as in outsourcing and contracting shops.

The role is not as useful in tech companies where developers are working permanently. It's actually hurting collaboration across teams if you start budgeting projects and people tightly.

The definition of PMI on what is a project: A project can be defined as a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service.

The Devs who are permanent employees and maintain a set codebase/application/etc do not fall into that. They know what to do, they have a defined Change Management/SDLC abd they are challenged into finding the technical solutio. The project management includes tracking the requirements, sequencing events, getting resources/contractors, etc.. A dev should be spending '8h' per day coding, not figuring out budgets and interviewing contractors. Of course different companies have different approaches, but ballpark and from experience I think my above writings are pretty valid.

I think the issue is that we call it project/product manager, but what we actually want is secretary.

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