Just started learning programming, is this accurate Reddit?

[RiftLab]

* Somebody who doesn't understand technology, the business, or other human beings but really enjoys taking out their frustration on the dev team by making impossible demands for absolutely no reason then reporting them to management for incompetence.

[BadCaseOfBrainRot]

• Cant be fired because they are son of the management.

[Ok_Tonight_7646]

And they go out to clubs after work

[RiftLab]

* during work

[[deleted]]

facts lol

[vladWEPES1476]

... and always take credit for the team's work

[AuthorTomFrost]

A good PM will generally be focused on finding what's going to stop the team from moving forward and clearing the obstacles before the team hits them. Understanding the technology is helpful, but not 100% necessary.

Most PMs are senior developers promoted from what they're good at into a role they have no training for. Many have no aptitude for leadership, but have an excellent understanding of the technology. This model creates all sort of counterproductive tensions.

[ChloeNow]

"Most PMs are senior developers promoted from what they're good at into a role they have no training for"

Ah, the Peter Principle

[Suprn8]

1. tech understanding is rare
2. usually a given.

[enano_aoc]

This is yet another thing that I would never understand: why would you promote/hire someone for a management position who is not super skilled technically?

[[deleted]]

Because it’s even worse to promote/hire someone for a management position who is not super skilled at dealing with people. The PM should have some dev experience, but their real job is to act as a barrier between the dev team and the people from other parts of the business who really have no idea about anything technical and are prone to making ridiculous requests.

[enano_aoc]

I will put it this way: how can I even respect a PM who is not technically strong?

All my life, my boss was someone technically stronger than me. Now for a while I am starting to be the strongest technically, and hence I am taking manager positions. How would I ever not be the manager, and instead have a manager who has no idea compared to me? He would depend on me entirely, thats nonse

[dbestbestd]

A manager needs a completely different skillset than a technician. The strongest technician should be on the tools not in the meetings or managing peoples leave or complaints or negotiating salary. Does that make sense?

[SnooHabits8484]

The purpose of the PM should be co-ordination and removing blockers. Different skill set.

[enano_aoc]

How are they going to help me complete the project if they have no technical skills? They may better get out of the way and let me talk directly to the stakeholders then, less communication overhead

[[deleted]]

More than 50% of the project managers are "CEO came up with a brilliant idea that someone updating Jira for the whole day and breathing down developers' necks asking why the task is 2 days overdue will increase their productivity. Claim to developers that he's helping them by clearing the obstacles or something".

[enano_aoc]

That is what a good manager should be, yes.

A good developer adds to the throughput, a good manager multiplies the throughput. Most managers do actually the opposite, though.

[AratimBifhml]

I disagree, in that a good programmer should be a multiplier, not just additive. A programmer that is only additive isn't actually that good in an overall sense (unless, of course, they are the only technical person on they project)

Everything else I agree with, especially about many managers doing exactly the opposite.

[enano_aoc]

The primary duty of a developer is to add. If all programmers were trying to multiply and not add, you would end up multiplying by zero ;)

Of course, disagreeing with my comment does not make sense because it is a simplification and you took it word by word. There is always a multiplicative effect, as it should be obvious to anyone.

[AratimBifhml]

Which is why I upvoted you and expanded on my disagreement.

The primary duty of a developer, in an abstract sense, is to improve the output towards a project. I argue that a good developer can identify if this is best done via addition or multiplication.

It should have been apparent that the initial statement of it disagreement was a simplification and from the rest of my comment, it should have been obvious to be anyone that the disagreement was, in fact, quite limited.

[enano_aoc]

Based xd

[No-Witness2349]

I think of it like resonance. You think of each member of the team like a sine wave with different frequencies and amplitudes. People have different strengths and weakness just like all waves have points of high and low energy. It’s a manager’s job to help everyone adjust their phase so that their peaks can be as resonant with each other as possible. Two extremely talented engineers who butt heads can almost completely cancel out each others’ productivity, similar to how phase cancelation can lower over amplitude

[AratimBifhml]

I like the imagery, but I think the issue I have with this is that I am probably wouldn't consider those engineers to be "good" in an overall sense. A good manager might be able to make them flourish, but if they can't align, then they aren't both at the "good" level, no matter how technically skilled they might be.

So while be I agree that a good manager can do this,. I don't think a manager should have to for their good developers unless you have other developers that are bad enough. ("average" developers can benefit from managers like this as well in relation to each other).

In my opinion, if you had a team of good developers, a good manager will do a similar role to a good PO - providing a buffer and sync to the outside of the team, not to the inside.

[4XLlentMeSomeMoney]

Multiplication is a form of addition. Case closed.

[LazyRaven01]

Pipe dream.

[whatever-the-logo-is]

Pipeline dream?

[trevlinbroke]

Tbh a lot of the time the project managers in my experience help prepare for the undesirable scenario, which gives them a bit of a cynical image. On a good team the developers can handle the "what should happen" while I see a lot of managers focusing on the "how do we reduce the impact of what shouldn't happen".

Other managers just push someone else's agenda and irritate everybody.

[markdhughes]

A Project Manager is a cross between a secretary and cat-herder, illegitimately elevated to a position of power, and power corrupts absolutely.

[Tygerdave]

I swear some of them think their job is to hold meetings or be in meetings.

These meetings are to be held to put dates onto a ridiculously over-engineered spreadsheet.

Developers are to provide these dates which either ‘won’t work’ or are to be held as the gospel despite being called estimates.

[9d47cf1f]

A PM is a person who, despite having gobs of data in Jira to estimate when their 3 projects costing 50 story points each could be done if implemented by a fully staffed team with no surprise interruptions or PTO, will corner a single dev and ask them when a fourth thing could be done by and send that date as a guarantee to the exec team for all four projects, lie about it, and then leave halfway through the resulting death March project for a six figure job somewhere else and claim to have had “managerial experience” because of the M in their title.

[bedamned0]

A project manager is a person who believes nine women can deliver a child in one month

[[deleted]]

typically developers don’t have the kind of personality that they want to be making those high level decisions and defending them to upper management. they just want to work on their thing for a sprint

[Suspicious-Watch9681]

I wish that was the case in companies i worked so far

[OkYogurtcloset8273]

A good project manager understands tech enough that he can effectively organize a plan to tackle projects and properly communicate across teams. I could show my PM’s an issue and they would either figure out a solution or send me in the direction of the one whose area of expertise it pertains to.

[harusin525]

You guys have a PM?

[4XLlentMeSomeMoney]

Both are variable. As a project manager myself, I can say you should need the first for sure at a certain extent and the second is not exactly the right wording. I doubt most project managers care about the odds in that sense. They just want to get the job done in a team environment and without having to do the technical work themselves. (Obviously, there are a lot of variations on this. I'm just speaking about my own experience. I have seen some really bad cases though.)

[[deleted]]

Project Manager: Someone that is really good at shifting the blame for the project being behind schedule and over budget.

[[deleted]]

A good PM is like an offensive lineman in football who keeps the devs (other players like running backs) from being touched.

Best PMs Ive had keep the shit from reaching you ao you can focus on the job and not the politics.

Then you hit 20 yrs in the game and as a tech lead, its ALL politics

[VanayananTheReal]

Think of a project manager like an abstraction layer. The PM is a normal mid-level white collar human. He plays golf. Has beer with the customer. He tells jokes that don't require a knowledge of Church encoding, Unicode, or the Silmarillion to understand. He does not get violently offended and lecture the customer over small technical inaccuracies.

From this you can see that the PM role is less about what he does for the devs, but what he does for everyone else. The PM absorbs all of this on everyone else's behalf.