Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

> 90%, maybe 93%, of project managers, could probably disappear tomorrow to either no effect or a net gain in efficiency.

This is more a statement on how many bad project managers there are rather than on the role itself being useless. I've worked as an IC with a lot of PM's over the course of my career - I can definitely bring to mind a few PM's that left a huge impression on the project I was working on. I can think of many more that were completely worthless. I think the latter group makes developers think the role itself is useless, which I could not disagree more with. Developers are absolutely terrible at balancing business and customer priorities with technical ones, and the worst part is, many of them believe they aren't bad at that.

View on HN

If the plurality are bad at their job, maybe the role itself needs at the very least a hard look.

Any time you find yourself saying "It's not the field that's fundamentally broken, it's that (almost) every individual in it just happens to suck (at it)," you need to take a step back and realize that that's the same problem.

If you have to be exceptionally skilled at something to do it in a way that's net positive, and that field doesn't reasonable filter for the exceptionally competent, then the field is setting individuals up for failure, and needs to be restructured.

And if most people in the role suck at it, you by definition have to be exceptionally skilled to succeed. Even if from the outside it looks like the people just tend to suck and the field is easy.

This isn't just a problem common to project management, it's very familiar sounding to "devops" teams as well - while I agree that something fundamentally needs to change I do not believe it is the same problem.

In the case of project management, what you have is horrible hiring practices that favor extreme credentialism (PMOC, etc) rather than a proven track record of results. Businesses seem think that anyone with a cert is going to be effective, but in my view, these certifications are mostly worthless in terms of actual skills gained.

Another thing is, what should even change? No one knows. This isn't an unknown phenomenon, there just isn't anything better at this current moment. It's very easy to point at things and say they should change, another thing entirely to propose a solution. To me, I would put more technical requirements on PM's rather than these dumb PM certs, as the better PM's I've worked with always seem to have a much deeper understanding of technical nuance than their shittier peers.

My experience has been that a good project manager is critical at defending against other teams' (bad) project managers. The other PM's can cause a lot of trouble if they're politically saavy.

This applies to business analysts, scrum/agile people, communications people, and other non-technical project staff, too.

I've observed an arms race at play in my department. Our team used to be 4-to-1 developers to business people. But we've increasingly needed to hire more business people just to defend ourselves against political scheming.

I can think of many more that were completely worthless.

But the question is why? I spent a decade of my career in civil engineering, and on the whole every project manager I dealt with there was both at least OK at their job and important to the success of the project. None were useless. If other technical fields can reliably produce competent project manager, why can't software?

> why can't software?

It can, but remember that we lost the competency to Agile, which is centred around eliminating managers in favour of self-organizing teams. For a time we didn't think we needed managers at all.

As we as an industry are coming to reject self-organization and now returning back to more formalized management again you might find some old timers from way back in the day who still remember how to manage, but if you watch any new manager coming onto the scene you will notice that they will reach for tools that were designed for operations without managers – because that's all they've ever known – introducing an interesting impedance mismatch.

It will no doubt correct some day, but these kinds of things tend to happen at a glacial pace. It could take decades for managers to discover/rediscover tools that are actually suitable for management, rather than something meant for self-organizing teams. As before, newer managers don't know anything else, so the impedance mismatch isn't even immediately recognizable. The default assumption is that this is just how it is done.

Agreed, I used to believe the same until I worked with a good project manager. But in hindsight they went way beyond their responsibilities and actually served as a mix of product/project/engineering manager. So maybe author's point stands in the sense most "project managers" think their job is moving jira tickets from one state to other

> Developers are absolutely terrible at balancing business and customer priorities with technical ones

True, but project managers are even worse! (There are always exceptions)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com