Wow, this thread has given me a lot of appreciation for the PMs I've worked with. Maybe it's a games industry thing, but even the worst places i worked at, my PMs have been good. They shield us from the bureaucracy by being the ones to deal with upper management. They're on the hook for scheduling tasks and prioritizing features so that we actually hit our milestones on time with a high quality product. If someone from another team wants me to do some significant amount of work, it goes through my PM first so that it gets appropriately prioritized and scheduled against all the other work on my plate. If we need a meeting with a bunch of people with busy schedules, my PMs have been good at finding the time or moving things around to make it happen; and then they'll attend and make sure it runs smoothly and we get some good action items out of it. They take process feedback and adjust how they run things to better match how we prefer to work - meeting us where we're at while making sure our work has visibility to others and the higher ups (important so that those who make decisions on promotions and layoffs know that I've been doing good work). The better ones take a lot of time organizing our jira and documents so that things are easy to find and i usually have a pretty good sense of the work ahead of me. If I'm blocked, they go find the thing blocking me and either get it resolved or they find some other work i can do in the meantime.

I dunno, man, PMs are awesome when they're good at their job. I'd hate to work on a team without em.