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nixCraft šŸ§

Don't you have a pointless meeting to schedule?

25 comments
Marcel Bischoff

@newsorpigal @nixCraft Iā€™m pretty sure you wouldnā€™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.

newsorpigal

@herrbischoff @nixCraft

In my experience 90% of all project managers are unqualified and unskilled people. Most companies would operate much more efficiently without them.

Marcel Bischoff

@newsorpigal @nixCraft The same argument could be made for 90% of all people in all professions, including software developers, depending on the viewpoint.

AndrƩ

@herrbischoff @newsorpigal @nixCraft Precisely! 90% of nurses and doctors are completely useless, and never contribute to the end goal.
Just like fire fighters!

Or?

newsorpigal

@Mabande @herrbischoff @nixCraft

Nurses, doctors and fire fighters do useful work. Project managers don't.

AndrƩ

@newsorpigal (that @herrbischoff was way off mark with "90% of all people in all professions" was kinda my point)

Marcel Bischoff

@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 ā€œmostā€ instead of ā€œallā€? If so, please assume from now on I did mean that.

AndrƩ

@herrbischoff @newsorpigal @nixCraft Sorry, but I had assumed more benign intent on your "90% of ALL people šŸ˜”" if you hadn't reflexively gone "not ALL project managers šŸ˜¢" on someone venting about bad PM's.

Marcel Bischoff

@Mabande @newsorpigal @nixCraft I honestly donā€™t understand what this means. I canā€™t parse it. But donā€™t worry, Iā€™m not prepared to go into this further. I believe to have been reasonably clear on my motives and meaning now.

moirearty

@newsorpigal @herrbischoff @nixCraft in CS-adjacent fields the qualification screws them. If theyā€™re nontechnical entirely above admin level tasks itā€™s pointless, unless you have thousands in your org.

Iā€™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 theyā€™re in and it wasnā€™t by starting off there.

moirearty

@newsorpigal @herrbischoff @nixCraft Iā€™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 ā€œscrum masterā€ titles: 0. Idiotic agile-XP / flavor of the year methodologies wasting everyoneā€™s time: 0.

Marcel Bischoff

@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 canā€™t tack it onto something existing. You need to throw everything out and need a capable PM. Which brings us back to square one.

moirearty

@herrbischoff @newsorpigal @nixCraft Yeah, definitely. And you also need to have a company with almost entirely self-starter high end developers, which isnā€™t cheap or easy but itā€™s a lot cheaper than having all of the structure for others. Iā€™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.

ā€œAIā€™sā€ impact is going to expose & wreck PM /middle management IMO, the $ people will catch on eventually.

Ulrich Auer :bike_verified:

@nixCraft
Who does not know this (regardless of profession)? šŸ¤£

John G Fitzgerald

@nixCraft šŸ¤£šŸ¤£šŸ¤£šŸ¤£šŸ¤£

Chris Vitalos āœ…

@nixCraft
I try to make them less pointless, even value added, by publishing an agenda prior to start, with clear wanted meeting outcomes. And following through with publishing minutes and actions. If you are not doing these tasks consistently, you are wasting busy people's valuable time.

British Tech Guru

@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.

Danny Boling ā˜®ļø

@nixCraft

A meeting whose only agenda item is to schedule future meetings? Why sure! :eyeroll:

Larry Smith

@nixCraft
Had I decided to be a manager I probably would have a pointless meeting to schedule.

Fortunately, having developed a disdain for pointless meetings, I chose a different career path.

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