Gregory's Server
 25 comments
  @newsorpigal @nixCraft I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t want to deal directly with clients or upper management. It drives you up the wall. Still, a good project manager works to remove obstacles, gets approval and generally clears the way. A bad one (which, sadly, many are) is simply an interfering busybody. Then again, keeping developers focused is like herding cats. It drives you up the wall. In my experience 90% of all project managers are unqualified and unskilled people. Most companies would operate much more efficiently without them. @newsorpigal @nixCraft The same argument could be made for 90% of all people in all professions, including software developers, depending on the viewpoint. @herrbischoff @newsorpigal @nixCraft Precisely! 90% of nurses and doctors are completely useless, and never contribute to the end goal. Or? @Mabande @herrbischoff @nixCraft Nurses, doctors and fire fighters do useful work. Project managers don't. @newsorpigal (that @herrbischoff was way off mark with "90% of all people in all professions" was kinda my point) @Mabande @newsorpigal @nixCraft How about assuming benign intent instead of reflexively starting to shout at me? Would it have made any difference for you if I had chosen the word “most” instead of “all”? If so, please assume from now on I did mean that. @herrbischoff @newsorpigal @nixCraft Sorry, but I had assumed more benign intent on your "90% of ALL people 😡" if you hadn't reflexively gone "not ALL project managers 😢" on someone venting about bad PM's. @Mabande @newsorpigal @nixCraft I honestly don’t understand what this means. I can’t parse it. But don’t worry, I’m not prepared to go into this further. I believe to have been reasonably clear on my motives and meaning now. @newsorpigal @herrbischoff @nixCraft in CS-adjacent fields the qualification screws them. If they’re nontechnical entirely above admin level tasks it’s pointless, unless you have thousands in your org. I’m convinced PMI is a scam that trains people how to do a convincing job to upper mgmt and a useless job for anyone else. PMs are just as like many MBAs, a few are great but most of the excellent ones found their own path to the biz / mgmt career they’re in and it wasn’t by starting off there. @newsorpigal @herrbischoff @nixCraft I’ve worked at bloated corporations and a company without middle management entirely and they are so much more efficient. Rank and file people had no more than a few meetings a week and just did their damn jobs, and they lead the industry niche they are in. Their core technology beats out other companies who are an order of magnitude larger. Amount of “scrum master” titles: 0. Idiotic agile-XP / flavor of the year methodologies wasting everyone’s time: 0. @moirearty @newsorpigal @nixCraft Agreed again. This is an entirely different and sane working environment with fundamentally different thinking though. PMs are one result of problematic company organisation and copying others without understanding _why_ it works what they do in the first place. Agile and Scrum and whatnot can work, sometimes. But you can’t tack it onto something existing. You need to throw everything out and need a capable PM. Which brings us back to square one. @herrbischoff @newsorpigal @nixCraft Yeah, definitely. And you also need to have a company with almost entirely self-starter high end developers, which isn’t cheap or easy but it’s a lot cheaper than having all of the structure for others. I’ve been very lucky to see startups rise and fall, work at big corps as well a research-oriented ones and at this point I could probably write a book. “AI’s” impact is going to expose & wreck PM /middle management IMO, the $ people will catch on eventually.  @nixCraft  @nixCraft if you start the meeting by blasting all the useless people with a phaser at max output then the meeting will end up with everybody in agreement and it will be pretty productive.  A meeting whose only agenda item is to schedule future meetings? Why sure! :eyeroll:  @nixCraft Fortunately, having developed a disdain for pointless meetings, I chose a different career path. |
@nixCraft far too often 🤣