Also can you actually do it in 2 days? That would be better.

At my job, me and another guy were given stuff to work on. But unknown to product, there’s a lot of shared code there.

In my imagination, it should be someone’s job to coordinate this. Instead, I finished a chunk of mine, he finished a chunk of his, and then there was confusion. Maybe that’s just a technical team lead’s job.

I’m still not sure what a project manager contributes.

I’ve well over a decade in software project management. The number one thing we contribute to a project is saying to the client (internal or external) “Sure, we can add that feature but it will have an impact on the delivery timeline unless we deprioritise other features. Are you happy for us to extend the deadline? If not, let’s talk about what we can cut from the existing scope in favour of your new feature.”

I have a friend who was a project manager. He took the time to learn every platform used by his team, but held no pretenses that he could actually develop anything without the team. His main goal was filter all the horseshit from the stakeholders and higher-ups so that they wouldn’t overwhelm the team with minutia. By learning the platforms and observing the team developing, he could make accurate predictions on timeliness based on whatever arbitrary feature was being requested and he’d always answer “let me ask my team” before discussing deliverables if he wasn’t sure.

The number of times that he explained in meetings that’s the team’s timeline didn’t change, but that the stakeholders’ expectations did and that introduced a new additional timeline was incredible. It’s unsurprising that he only lasted a year or two before his bosses started pushing for a promotion. Seeing him work made mean bit jealous that I couldn’t be on his team, but we work at different companies and I don’t want to join the private sector if I can be of benefit to public education.

They are there for higher ups to bitch at in toxic orgs. Thats why they pester constantly; noone wanta to be bitched at.

A big project with lots of people and moving parts that doesn’t need each individual tracking their own status and needs because the Project Manager is keeping everything up to date and keeping the Senior Managers off your back is invaluable.

Go Live was buttery smooth. We were all in and out by lunch, even after having to address a hang up on the fly.

Good project managers are worth their weight in gold

They’re technically there to ensure the project has the correct resources aligned, and manage the project budget.

Aka if they want timely updates, they can purchase & fetch me coffee! I don’t need them, but they sure as hell need me.

Good project managers are invaluable. I’d much rather explain status to a sympathetic ear and have them reword it for diplomacy than try and directly advocate with executives - and I celebrate any customer communications I don’t have to be a party to.

When PMs act like part of the dev team and handle the communication side of the project it lets devs focus on the important shit… and if your PM is asking for daily updates then they’re too green (or you’re too unreliable) to have built up a good level of trust. Nobody fucking cares if a project is delivered at 3PM or 4PM, so who the fuck cares about daily or hourly project updates - the status won’t be materially different.

It’s like managers or fellow developers - good ones are invaluable and shitty ones make everyone’s lives harder… the difference is that PM seems to be a position that attracts do-nothing folks so it’s more likely you’ll get a shitty roll.

I don’t work in software, I’m a chemical (aka process) engineer.

Some project managers are superfluous if they don’t have a background being an engineer of some discipline themselves, but the vast majority I’ve worked with are excellent because they have a working knowledge of everything required to progress each stage of the project, and deal with most of the client interactions.

Being able to say: “we’ve done x, but we still need y, z and aa to progress” and then the project manager organising this getting done together with the other discipline leads is a godsend, letting you focus on doing the actual calculations/design/nitty-gritty details. And the fact they manage the annoying role of dealing with clients and the disagreements around that is also great.

This is working as a consultant, but I imagine if you replace clients with higher ups, I’d imagine the same still applies.

Perhaps things are very different in software, but I do think there is some use for them.

But I’ve never had one check up every 15 mins, more like once a day, and only if something is very time sensitive. Otherwise it’s once a week, or by email as required.

They’re supposed to work as an adaptor/buffer/filter between the technical side and the non-technical stakeholders (customers, middle/upper management) and doing some level of organising.

In my 2 and a half decades of experience (a lot of it as a freelancer, so I worked in a lot of companies of all sizes in a couple of countries), most aren’t at all good at it, and very few are very good at it.

Some are so bad that they actually amplify uncertainty and disorganisation by, every time they talk to a customer or higher up, totally changing the team’s direction and priorities.

Mind you, all positions have good professionals and bad professionals, the problem with project management is that a bad professional can screw a lot of work of a lot of people, whilst the damage done by, for example, a single bad programmer, tends to be much more contained and generally mainly impacts the programer him or herself (so that person is very much incentivised to improve).

I’ve had, hands down, one of the worst project managers in the world. Hewas overly concerned with team politics and toxicly positive. His toxic positivity was the main reason in my opinion as to why we never delivered anything usable to the company and were eventually downsized. He had no vision at all for quick and frequent delivery… he was the wrong person for the job but consistently believed that he just needed to “do his best for the day” and sleep happy that night. Meanwhile, his team was boiling with frustration and wasted work hours for features requested by management on a whim — these usually end up fully forgotten by the time they are production ready. His biggest accomplishment is somewhat shielding his team from upper management… sometimes. He was such a bottle neck and our team was a net loss to the company except where they could advertise “using AI” in their products. If he had been removed, and we (his team) had to manage things ourselves with the stakeholders, we would have probably been able to deliver something worthwhile every quarter or so.

The most important part of developing hacking tools is to have a UI that includes text scrolling really quickly with little beep, blip, and bloop noises.

Your father died protecting free markets

If you hate the taste of scrum give SAFe a try! (but really, please don’t)

I mean, Agile doesn’t really demand that you do or don’t use tickets. You can definitely use tickets without scrum.

Then again, the guy giving you that remark usually doesn’t know the difference

And silicon valley

WHICH IS WHY WE SHOULD DEREGULATE EVERYTHING! INCLUDING FOOD AND DRINKING WATER, AND WE SHOULD ALLOW ALLOW COMAPNIES TO DUMP INTO RIVERS!

I love hollywood

It’s my favorite Godzilla movie because of this aspect. There’s a scene where I lost it in the theater when the >!Prime Minister is completely certain in telling the press that Godzilla will absolutely never, not in a million years, not make landfall… only to have an underling whisper in his ear that Godzilla just made landfall.!<

I worked for a Japanese company at the time, and could recognize that it wasn’t even heightened for parody. That’s just exactly how it is.

I am currently doing this right now, pharma code team gave me a whole program and now i need to find out how everything works…