Project managers are essential for larger projects…
Please tell us what “essential things” they do.
Keep everyone, and I mean everyone including senior management and directors, on task, on track, and all pointing in the same direction.
Good ones keep scope creep in check, and make sure decisions made last week are adhered to today.
The problem is there are a lot of not great PM’s, and a lot of management that run roughshod over PM’s.
I think I might be a project manager. it’s not my job description, but a good amount of my time is spent coordinating client needs (software), company needs (money), management needs (reassurance) and developer needs (concise and complete design, and decisionmaking).
Normally there are 6 software projects on the go at any one time, all in various stages of production that I need to keep ticking over to prevent a backlog or a gap in work for the Devs.
I’m fortunate that my only supervisor is the owner of the company and he now trusts me enough to say “Do whatever gets the job done” and so I don’t get micromanaged or roadblocked on decisionmaking. I choose the Devs, the architecture, the design, the timeline, and the budget. I take a dictatorial attitude to the clients to force their nebulous and sometimes stupid ideas into a clean, detailed, and clearly defined box long before the Devs ever hear of it. I take a very hands-off approach with the Devs, giving them plenty of support, asking for their advice, accepting their limitations and a very quick yes/no/alt when they have questions or recommendations. I don’t micromanage them, but I do have a system that helps me identify problems with the delivery pipeline. They also know I’m excruciatingly thorough in my testing so between their own testing and mine, very few bugs make it to production.
As for my manager, he pops his head in maybe twice a week to give me updates on stuff but otherwise leaves me alone, and I take a very firm line with all of the other senior management and clients when it comes to adhering to the project development procedure, which I wrote. I have no fear of telling people no, or telling them that we stick to the procedure or no work commences. Maybe I’ll get fired for being a hardass to mgmt one day, but it’s been 4 years and I don’t think I will.
I keep detailed track of every involved party, every task, event, meeting, test and correspondence between me and any other involved person, but they don’t know that.
And if anything goes wrong with the project, it’s my fault. I’d never blame the Devs for not for seeing something that I should have foreseen, and I’d never blame the client for not providing information that I should have asked for and verified.
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I’ve literally always described my job as babysitting
I like ‘herding cats’, but babysitting is quite accurate.
I need to be babysat, otherwise, how do I know what to do? And trust me, you do not want me working on whatever I just find interesting.
A good project manager is worth their weight in gold. Large scale projects are complex and have lots of moving parts. Someone who understands this and is good at keeping all the “parts” moving while heading off any potential issues is extremely value.
The problem is that often the people doing the hiring don’t know what it takes to run a large project, much less what good project management looks like. They just hire some idiot with an agile certification whose only skill is moving items around a kanban board in a way that gives the illusion that progress is being made.
Yeah, as a General Foreman in construction I would be up to my eyeballs in nonsense without my PM.
This is the correct take.
Another problem is when management somehow manages to make a simple project into a crazy complex project.
I see two drivers of this: General empire building, more headcount under me == I am more important
Trying to use unvetted, low quality labor to do something being their abilities and trying to make it up with volume because corporate leadership declared it should be possible and anyone who says otherwise it’s a bad fit for the company.
Dependencies! Deliverables! Blockers!
Put me in coach, I’m ready!
Circle back, take this offline, T-shirt size
“Have you looked at the gantt chart? Are you on schedule?”
- Project Manager (keeps everything on their personal drive and somehow expects everyone to have access to it)
“The fuck is a gantt chart? I handle piss all day long”
- Me (smelling of piss and not giving a shit about whatever that is)
My biggest ask is whether or not we can parking lot this.
Dear God… I tried to think of some more from my time in that world, and all I could come up with was “when the rubber meets the road.”
There must be more, but I have forgotten. Is it finally wearing off? I’m free now, after so many years? I can just be happy?
I’m absolutely thrilled on your behalf to hear you’ve successfully sunsetted that legacy temporal paradigm—those kinds of linguistic feedback loops can really create mindshare bottlenecks, leading to suboptimal ideation and a lack of disruptive communication innovation. At the end of the day, it’s about leaning into agile thought leadership, pivoting away from antiquated verbiage, and unlocking next-gen linguistic bandwidth to drive scalable, high-impact dialogue. Remember: It’s not just about thinking outside the box—it’s about disrupting the box, burning the box, and monetizing the ashes for maximum stakeholder engagement!
Nice try, but you can’t touch me. I’m not reading this and I’m leaving to go get tacos.
I’d love a taco
If the food truck has Birria, get me a plate. I’ll get you back next time.
Said and done
We’re so proud of you
The paradigm shift is strong with this one.
Your clear grasp on the language as a SME goes a long way towards breaking down the silos within our resources. We’ll need to set a strong cadence in order to drive these new workflows from storming to norming. I’ll set a friendly follow-up to make sure your progress doesn’t get yellow-lighted in this week’s board review. I really appreciate your time on this task. Keep up the good work! Best, Robot.
Edit: Looks like I can give everyone 5 minutes of their day back!
I would add to that: A lot of a good project manager’s job is shielding the team from bullshit from above.
You can push back on people randomly deciding that changes need to be made to the project, push back on requests for mandatory overtime or whatever, fight to expand the team when it needs to be expanded, intervene when someone “high up” is trying to single out some person on the team for blame, and so on and so forth. Even on projects where a lot of the organization can be done by the team itself (which is a lot of them), there’s a vital role just in having an advocate for the team present in “management.”
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I was a project manager for a pretty large project last year at my job. I really tried my best to shield the developers from all the bullshit. We had a very difficult customer who changed their mind almost twice a week about things, demanded meetings about the progress 2-3 times a week, didn’t understand that the requested changes won’t be in the testsystem within a day of mentioning them (not even sending us a proper change request in writing, just mentioning them in a meeting) and so on. Not to mention talking with the higher-ups who got nervous when the customer kept complaining and explaining to them that we/the devs are working as fast as possible and that the customer is being unreasonable.
The worst part about that role was not the utterly irrational customer but our own colleagues in development. They unloaded all their frustration about the project on me. I tried to handle it, in a way it’s part of the job. I got shit on by the customer for not meeting their unreasonable demands and ridiculous timelines, got shit on by upper management because this project with this very important customer is having trouble, had to defend myself AND the rest of the team by showing that the customer doesn’t know what they want. Just to then turn around and get screamed at by a dev because he’s sick of having to go to our 1/2-hour-a-week meeting and also how come there’s been four change requests already. He told me I wasn’t doing my job, because all he wants is to implement the requirements as planned half a year ago but I kept sending change requests instead of doing my job as a project manager and shielding him from this shit. Wouldn’t believe me that if the customer had his way, he’d be getting four change requests per week.
Yeah, I’m pissed and also currently looking for a new job. And no way am I ever doing this shit job again, where you’re just everybody’s doormat and get yelled at by customers, bosses and your own team alike.
Yeah. Life is short man. I wish you luck in the search, 100%.
An old friend of mine was in a similar situation (worse, I think, if you can believe) and also getting shit for pay. After a while, he went to his boss and explained that he needed things A, B, and C to change if he was going to stay in this role. His boss started yelling at him and belittling him, he stuck to his guns and basically just reiterated what he had said.
Obviously, nothing changed, and so he told his boss he was out. When the next day he didn’t show up, his boss called him at home and started yelling at him again. He said it was like all the cares of the world, all the heaviness and stress just fell away suddenly, during the conversation. As it happened his boss was in the middle of yelling, “We don’t need you, you son of a bitch” or something like that, and he was able to cut in to say something along the lines “Hey, man, if you don’t need me, don’t call me. I’m at home. I did my part. You called me. Anything else I can do for you?”
The smile on his face when he relayed this part of the story to me was a wonderful thing to behold.
there’s a vital role just in having an advocate for the team present in “management.”
As a bench level employee, every time I’m asked how long something will take I have to take time to assess where I’m at, what needs doing, and when people in other departments will be able to get to their portion of the project (answer: fuck if I know), which takes even more time away from the project. Then I have to go back and figure out where I was and what I was doing on the project that I was working on. I’m typically on three or so projects at a time in various stages of complete, with one or two waiting in the wings. When you have a different person every day asking you about a different project than the one you’re working on at that exact moment, it seriously slows things down.
This and the following thread are great guidelines for would-be PMs.
Personally, however, I will avoid the role for the rest of my life, because it’s too much work.
You say that until the first time you join a team with multiple projects to accomplish and zero project or program management. It sucks. Badly.
I pine for very excellent PMs I’ve known.
I had a manager once with a powerful knack for hiring great ones. The only problem was that each and every one of them got poached for upper management in the business.
This fairy tale still lives? Sheesh, some people really are dense. Like, neutron star kind of dense
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 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 or 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.
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.”
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.
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 is my expereince, a good PM manages expectations and pushes back on the builder from trying to forge ahead with construction when the staging isnt right or areas arent ready, instead of being yes men and cracking the whip to make tradies get things done to appease their superiors. And they will negotiate cross-trade eith other PM’s or tradies to see what arrangements will make mutliple parties happy when there are clashes and try keep things uninterrupted so everyone can keep ticking away at their own tasks.
A Project Manager is someone who thinks nine women can deliver a baby in one month.
“Hellen, you were supposed to only do the left arm! What am I supposed to do with a whole baby!?”
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.
Fuckin’ preach. I’ve worked with a single pm worth their salt, and they got driven out by the useless cunts that couldn’t MANAGE to get from their desk to a toilet without a meeting.
In my experience it’s because the terrible PMs are happy to shift their blame onto someone else, whereas the proficient PMs don’t shy away from their mistakes. The good pm gets fired for taking someone else’s responsibility and the bad ones stay piling their shit onto others. Good PMs can’t survive.
In my career most of the actually competent PMs actually got poached so we’re left with the scraps.
Mine is the incompetents blame the competents for THEIR fuckups, and the competent ones don’t put up with that shit.
A lot of places park people who can’t cut it doing the actual work in the project in project management roles instead of moving them on. They think, ohh they have intimate knowledge of the project and the working parts they’ll be great.
It happens a lot for regular management as well.
A properly trained, proficient project manager can get more done with less people, defuse situations before they happen and cool the jets of higher ups making unreasonable demands.
Of course, some places are just shitholes run by assholes to which none of this applies.
