Hacker News Reader

Comment by lukasb | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry that you've apparently only worked with bad PMs.

Unfortunately, you don't have to work with bad PMs very often, to occasionally experience a year or more of misery due to their ineptitude.

Good PMs are a bit of a paradox. They are immensely impactful and bring value to every project they touch. Yet they are also far overqualified for what is often a thankless job.

I also have come to the view that even good PMs will rarely allocate the work that is truly impactful. Some of the best work of my career has been when I've gone off piste and prototyped something that has surprised my managers or disrupted the way a team thought they had to work.

You can't go rogue often, and you have to expend your political capital carefully. But you will never do the best work of your career waiting for someone to assign you it in JIRA.

Best PMs I've had were former engineers. They aren't ALL great but at least when we'd tell them that to build a feature we have to lay new groundwork instead of blasting out a hack, they generally understand why that's a good idea.

What are the downsides to "going rogue" too often? Where do politics come into play here?

PMs promised the business X would get done because it was great. Now they have to explain developer Y didn't deliver that. Disappointment ensues and PM has to sell rogue work as also great (so why wasn't it planned instead of the other less great thing).

As someone already said, it's a thankless job and I empathize.

Signed: frequently rogue developer.

If your "going rogue" project fails, then you can be seen as not having done any work for X weeks. If your manager was against you working on that project--especially if they needed you to work on something else--then you will be seen poorly, and that can be rough for your career.

I think it could actually be a pretty good strategy to optimize your job search for the degree to which you might be able to go rogue and get away with it.

I am pretty up front about being chaotic good and seeing that historically I add a ton of value when I am given some free rein to fix things or just make some (or a bunch of people's) lives easier, I often seek forgiveness rather than permission but - I am also willing to accept push back (always a hey, this fixes this and that, what do people think? not a "I made the terrible code perfect and you must accept this), I try to be clear about where my time is going is my own assigned work is going slower, not usually because I'm off over-engineering some internal tool. but because when you get a reputation as someone that can help people fix things, lots of your time is about unblocking others cause they trust that they can come to you (which levels the whole team up, but sometimes means individual commitments fall behind), and I am try to push for the whole team to have less fear and more freedom to have a day a month where they just work on whatever tech debt they want, or throw up a quick PR for discussion about something they see, etc etc. And I'm also clear that if the org doesn't see value in what I'm doing, that's their call to make, because I also know I can find one that will.

But in my experience the devs that want to /optimize/ for going rogue, are the ones you least want re-engineering your entire auth system overnight with code no one else understands and/or the most abrasive when it comes to arguing about why they are right. It's a gentle balance and being honest, kind, and collaborative goes pretty far....

I've had more job misery due to bad other devs than bad PMs.

I can negotiate with my PM. I can't negotiate with the bad dev who made every method call in every file depend implicitly/somewhat indirectly on 20+ things two years ago because "long argument lists = bad" but "dependency injection = good". That ship sailed and it still hurting me every time I need to add a new feature.

> Some of the best work of my career has been when I've gone off piste and prototyped something that has surprised my managers or disrupted the way a team thought they had to work.

When I came to this realization myself, it was both sad (losing faith in the system which I had, until then, trusted to allocate work effectively) and liberating (I can just trust myself and do what I believe to be best)

> Good PMs are a bit of a paradox. They are immensely impactful and bring value to every project they touch. Yet they are also far overqualified for what is often a thankless job.

In 2013 I went to a project management conference. I'd realised that as a developer I was stepping into this role frequently as I worked at a small agency, and I enjoyed stopping projects becoming disorganised messes.

Talking to PMs about what being a proper PM entailed, I heard too many say "if the project goes well someone else will take the credit, but if it goes badly for any reason you'll take the blame. And you don't have power, you can only ask up/down the organisation while at the mercy of politics".

So I decided "no thanks" and stayed a developer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com