Microblog Memes

This is the correct take.

This and the following thread are great guidelines for would-be PMs.

Personally, however, I will avoid the role for the rest of my life, because it’s too much work.

Dependencies! Deliverables! Blockers!

Put me in coach, I'm ready!

Yeah, as a General Foreman in construction I would be up to my eyeballs in nonsense without my PM.

I would add to that: A lot of a good project manager's job is shielding the team from bullshit from above.

You can push back on people randomly deciding that changes need to be made to the project, push back on requests for mandatory overtime or whatever, fight to expand the team when it needs to be expanded, intervene when someone "high up" is trying to single out some person on the team for blame, and so on and so forth. Even on projects where a lot of the organization can be done by the team itself (which is a lot of them), there's a vital role just in having an advocate for the team present in "management."

Another problem is when management somehow manages to make a simple project into a crazy complex project.

I see two drivers of this: General empire building, more headcount under me == I am more important

Trying to use unvetted, low quality labor to do something being their abilities and trying to make it up with volume because corporate leadership declared it should be possible and anyone who says otherwise it's a bad fit for the company.

how?

Note I've seen the "protecting me from a meeting" backfire so hard.

One time for lack of headcount I did a bit of double duty as project manager including executive meetings. Then management found a project manager and instead of knocking out my part of those meetings in like 5 minutes, I suddenly had generally hour long prep meetings so my new project manager would be confident enough to engage in whatever random topic the execs tended to go into. After a quarter they demanded I swap back in to do the meetings instead, which I was happy to do.

Also, those meetings are my best chance to cut through some confusion so I don't end up with a mess of crap in the tracker.

Sounds like your manager is the project manager lmao

Unfortunately, you're right about as much as the original meme is. At my current gig, I've worked with half a dozen PMs, and while the majority of them were (seemingly) sweet and nice people, at least half of them would struggle to pour piss out of a boot if you wrote instructions on the heel. Even with project templates and runbooks, we still regularly had to clean up after them because they didn't do part of the project or expected us to work on stuff that wasn't marked as being live yet.

Acceptable ones aren't too rare, that is, ones that don't have negative productivity -- depending on the industry and company politics, in some places it's BS all the way down. Good ones are rare and stellar ones are unicorns as it's a dual mastery thing: You have to be good at both the technical aspects, as well as the people aspect, and neither of those two can be mere talent, it needs to be talent and education. Judging by Alice Cecile, being a systems ecologist is the right overall qualification.

There are definitely some amazing PMs, but I've met way more terrible PMs who don't know shit about fuck and don't care to learn than good PMs.

I've definitely seen both extremes. It's insane the difference a good PM makes, but they're rare because of how much pressure they have to handle. It's an ungrateful job.

Yeah, my team actually has a mix of great, good, and replacement level PMs. The bad ones either get let go or moved elsewhere. It helps that we tend to draw them from the roles that would be on projects they'd manage and seem to compensate them well enough that we retain all the good ones.

If an org can't find good PMs, the org needs to create them and pay them enough that they stick in the role. It's not easy, but it's not rocket science.

that's not useless, that's actively harmful

I like 'herding cats', but babysitting is quite accurate.

I need to be babysat, otherwise, how do I know what to do? And trust me, you do not want me working on whatever I just find interesting.

In my career most of the actually competent PMs actually got poached so we're left with the scraps.