ITT: People who don’t know the difference between product, program, and project managers.

Management is needed, you let ppl do whtever they want and nothing gets done in any reasonable amount of time

Good managers are able to allocate resources–particularly human resources–to complete a task. I know that it’s a common trope to think that managers only take value instead of adding it, but it’s simply not true; processes and production are less efficient without effective management.

People working in production shouldn’t have to deal with clients/customers, nor should they be expected to coordinate with vendors, or even all other people involved in production. Production people are hired for their skill/expertise in production, so they should be left to do their job rather than taking on more jobs.

The flip side is that ineffective management can make processes and production less efficient than they would be without any management at all.

People who think managers are useless have either likely only worked for good ones or bad ones. Good ones make it look so easy it looks like they do nothing.

Quite often when I’m managing the work floor if we have a good week I have almost nothing to do on fridays. Sometimes the staff make comments about it and I always say the same thing “If I’m scrambling on Friday, it means I fucked up on Wednesday and we’re all going to have a shitty Monday.”

As a software guy, I love this. People building and running software products don’t need project managers. We ned product owners/managers. It’s a product, it has users, it doesn’t have an end date.

I understand the sentiment, but I had the pleasure of working with a great PM on a high profile project in my company and it was really good. The more moving parts and stakeholders there are, the more you’re going to need someone to manage the stream of information, set expectations, keep the focus on the end goal. It was very good and I learned a lot from them.

This fairy tale still lives? Sheesh, some people really are dense. Like, neutron star kind of dense

What some PMs don’t understand is they don’t lead the team but instead they should be supporting the team so that the job gets done on time. Shuffle around resources, reverse manage upper management, protect the team from being derailed etc.

This is in construction, though, and I’ve no idea about how the tech industry works.

This may come as a surprise to some, but project managers exist outside of software as well.

I fucking hate comments defending PMs like “you hate PMs if you only worked with bad ones”

Fuck no, they’re the idea guys of tech, they’re useless. Their entire existence depends on engineers not giving enough fucks about the product. They’re the result of a broken team structure. They’re annoying and have no real skills, which is proven by their excitement about AI nowadays. Every PM I’ve came across is hyping up AI, most of them vibe coding, whatever the fuck that means.

I think a super important thing people forget is a good PMs ability to always know where the data is that’s been received. Can’t tell you the number of times there’s been conversations “we’re waiting on x from the client” and the PM being long it’s right here in the standard location. How they remember everything I don’t know.

The PM’s job is to stop those doing the project from getting derailed. Literally manage the project. This means holding the stakeholder’s feet to the fire. If the steak holder agrees to the terms they need to accept the repercussions of changing requirements, and their own misunderstanding.

Bad PMs don’t hold the line. They don’t signal early when bad things may be coming soon. They let all the shit derail productivity.

This is why systems like Agile were created. By making derailment a ceremony it became acceptable to remove the onus of the stakeholder to really make sure the project is ready and worth it.

edit: i should read over my dictated comments a little better

They’re only useless if they legitimately suck at their job or don’t give a fuck.

A good project manager will go a long way to keeping things running smoothly.

I worked as an academic and supported and got funding for my programs for decades. I was a higher level GS employee for the feds and I ran new product development for a couple small to medium biotech firms. The last firm I worked for got bought by a giant multinational company which rhymes with Spargill. They changed the way we did things and suddenly, I had a “Project manager”, who didn’t know anything about the project I developed and managed. Nor did they do anything else I could figure out other than call me on the phone and ask what I was up to and how the projects, which I developed and was PI on were going. I swear to god I have no idea what these people did, but EVERYONE who was a scientist got at least one of these useless managers. And I can bet those “managers” got paid more than we did. Anyway, the only thing I could figure out was that project managers were positions given to people who couldn’t do any real science anymore but had played the game and needed a reward. So their reward was to call up people like me every once in a while and ask me how things were going. Were there EVER a more useless job I can’t imagine what it might be.

I don’t have a project manager and shit can’t get done because I don’t have the authority to get other people to do their job but I’m still held accountable for its progress. My direct manager thinks I’m supposed to do it even though it’s not in my job title. I’m thinking of finding another job.