Man, gotta disagree here. There are deadweights under every job title. Had a pm that literally carried the team on her back, while simultaneously shielding us from bullshit from on high.
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.
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.
The current PM where I work:
- cannot figure out audio settings for teams
- cannot understand microphone feedback loops
- cannot ask you your status on a task without giving just enough time for you to think it’s your turn to speak only to then start speaking again the moment you start explaining your status
- cannot understand that an explanation for the status of a task can apply to multiple similar tasks
- always second guesses decisions
Their only actual job as far as I can tell is to tell the suits what they want to hear in their fucked up little business language. But I haven’t seen that, so maybe they’re terrible at that as well.
It feels like they memorized and religiously practice the CIA’s handbook for field sabotage.
A good project manager is worth their weight in gold. Large scale projects are complex and have lots of moving parts. Someone who understands this and is good at keeping all the “parts” moving while heading off any potential issues is extremely valuable.
The problem is that often the people doing the hiring don’t know what it takes to run a large project, much less what good project management looks like. They just hire some idiot with an agile certification whose only skill is moving items around a kanban board in a way that gives the illusion that progress is being made.
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.
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.”
I was a project manager for a pretty large project last year at my job. I really tried my best to shield the developers from all the bullshit. We had a very difficult customer who changed their mind almost twice a week about things, demanded meetings about the progress 2-3 times a week, didn’t understand that the requested changes won’t be in the testsystem within a day of mentioning them (not even sending us a proper change request in writing, just mentioning them in a meeting) and so on. Not to mention talking with the higher-ups who got nervous when the customer kept complaining and explaining to them that we/the devs are working as fast as possible and that the customer is being unreasonable.
The worst part about that role was not the utterly irrational customer but our own colleagues in development. They unloaded all their frustration about the project on me. I tried to handle it, in a way it’s part of the job. I got shit on by the customer for not meeting their unreasonable demands and ridiculous timelines, got shit on by upper management because this project with this very important customer is having trouble, had to defend myself AND the rest of the team by showing that the customer doesn’t know what they want. Just to then turn around and get screamed at by a dev because he’s sick of having to go to our 1/2-hour-a-week meeting and also how come there’s been four change requests already. He told me I wasn’t doing my job, because all he wants is to implement the requirements as planned half a year ago but I kept sending change requests instead of doing my job as a project manager and shielding him from this shit. Wouldn’t believe me that if the customer had his way, he’d be getting four change requests per week.
Yeah, I’m pissed and also currently looking for a new job. And no way am I ever doing this shit job again, where you’re just everybody’s doormat and get yelled at by customers, bosses and your own team alike.
Yeah. Life is short man. I wish you luck in the search, 100%.
An old friend of mine was in a similar situation (worse, I think, if you can believe) and also getting shit for pay. After a while, he went to his boss and explained that he needed things A, B, and C to change if he was going to stay in this role. His boss started yelling at him and belittling him, he stuck to his guns and basically just reiterated what he had said.
Obviously, nothing changed, and so he told his boss he was out. When the next day he didn’t show up, his boss called him at home and started yelling at him again. He said it was like all the cares of the world, all the heaviness and stress just fell away suddenly, during the conversation. As it happened his boss was in the middle of yelling, “We don’t need you, you son of a bitch” or something like that, and he was able to cut in to say something along the lines “Hey, man, if you don’t need me, don’t call me. I’m at home. I did my part. You called me. Anything else I can do for you?”
The smile on his face when he relayed this part of the story to me was a wonderful thing to behold.
Agreed. I was involved in a project that lasted several years and the project manager was great at filtering out the bullshit and politics so it doesn’t go down to my level. They were also great as an interface between teams so I wouldn’t need to directly deal with people who are difficult to work with. I wish she was the project manager on the other projects I’m involved in right now.
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.
Dependencies! Deliverables! Blockers!
Put me in coach, I’m ready!
Circle back, take this offline, T-shirt size
Dear God… I tried to think of some more from my time in that world, and all I could come up with was “when the rubber meets the road.”
There must be more, but I have forgotten. Is it finally wearing off? I’m free now, after so many years? I can just be happy?
I’m absolutely thrilled on your behalf to hear you’ve successfully sunsetted that legacy temporal paradigm—those kinds of linguistic feedback loops can really create mindshare bottlenecks, leading to suboptimal ideation and a lack of disruptive communication innovation. At the end of the day, it’s about leaning into agile thought leadership, pivoting away from antiquated verbiage, and unlocking next-gen linguistic bandwidth to drive scalable, high-impact dialogue. Remember: It’s not just about thinking outside the box—it’s about disrupting the box, burning the box, and monetizing the ashes for maximum stakeholder engagement!
Your clear grasp on the language as a SME goes a long way towards breaking down the silos within our resources. We’ll need to set a strong cadence in order to drive these new workflows from storming to norming. I’ll set a friendly follow-up to make sure your progress doesn’t get yellow-lighted in this week’s board review. I really appreciate your time on this task. Keep up the good work! Best, Robot.
Edit: Looks like I can give everyone 5 minutes of their day back!
Nice try, but you can’t touch me. I’m not reading this and I’m leaving to go get tacos.
I’d love a taco
We’re so proud of you
If the food truck has Birria, get me a plate. I’ll get you back next time.
Said and done
My biggest ask is whether or not we can parking lot this.
Yeah, as a General Foreman in construction I would be up to my eyeballs in nonsense without my PM.
This is the correct take.
project managers (or any types of managers) who are forces of nature can really drive things forward. this person talks about the useless kind of manager which often tries to interject him/her self in everything slowing things down. They act like this mostly because otherwise they would be useless as that is their only skill and they got the position through mix of luck and network.
You say that until the first time you join a team with multiple projects to accomplish and zero project or program management. It sucks. Badly.
I pine for very excellent PMs I’ve known.
I had a manager once with a powerful knack for hiring great ones. The only problem was that each and every one of them got poached for upper management in the business.
A good PM will herd all the cats and attend all the meetings you don’t want to. They’re worth their weight in gold.
A bad PM will do none of the above and constantly drag you in to fight their fires. They’re worth their weight in, well, you know.
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.
As a PM who tries to not waste anyone’s time, thank you. I’ve had pushback before from people who don’t like to do the talking, but I would only call that person forward if it’s going to prevent a ton of headaches all around. Sometimes it’s difficult to explain that. Otherwise I have no problem being the punching bag on stage. It’s my job.
Fixed it.
how?
Now it fills vertical screens completely!
I’ve literally always described my job as babysitting
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.
I like ‘herding cats’, but babysitting is quite accurate.
venture capitalist
that’s not useless, that’s actively harmful
Look ain’t saying I agree with it
But they’re right up there with Scrum Masters. Guides whatever
