Project Manager Hate

None of these are a problem if you do scrum properly and your sm/po are actually good at their jobs. You work for a shitty company go find a better one if you aren't shit yourself.

I've worked for fortune 500s and shithole startups.
Its endemic

Is your product manager not also a developer doing the same shit as you? Sounds like either you're working with an incompetent fuck or you're an antisocial fuck.

PMs are almost never developers

None of those things mean good project management, but congrats on a wide range of employment.

Whoops, got PM and team lead mixed up
That said, my PM literally held the same position I do right now and I'd say has a very good grasp of what's reasonable.

I'm convinced good project management is a unicorn. I've been at a FANG they had shit PMs

This. Scrum was the best thing to happen to our company. As long as your company isn't filled with faggots who want everything to stay the same it's great. I will admit developers basically naturally tend to work that way, management takes the biggest hit as far as change goes and people like to cling to their power so it can be hard sometimes.

In all honesty, you're probably right. My current job is the only one with good management out of the 5 places I've been. All were non fang tho.

PMs suck ass. I want to know wtf they actually do every day

They just go to random fucking meetings that THEY THEMSELVES schedule

Fuck PMs

Project Managers exist to make sure more women work in "tech"

And street-shitters

so shes a woman
im sorry user no one should have to deal with that

Do y'all even know how much fucking work it is to direct a project?
Coordinating people is a full time job, getting targets that make sense above and below isn't an easy thing, keeping those under you working and feeling productive isn't an easy thing. Your PM's are shit because they don't actually listen.
There isn't a reason for a meeting if your disseminating information without feedback. That's what email/slack is for.

Set up, buy in, and follow through is a constant process that takes no small amount of time.

PMs exist to keep people accountable. Most of employees are super lazy and unreliable. If you didn't have those meetings and checkups, I'd say 9/10 employees would eventually just regress into slacking around.

diversity hire, its like giving “jobs” to retarded people to make them feel included

PMs exist to get a fat female ass into a seat and pay them a useless salary so they can later tell engineers "sorry we cant give you a raise"

>work in construction industry as IT
>PMs are always engineers or at the very least EIT's
>Handle Invoices, Change orders, ROI etc.
>Scheduling
>Cost-Benefit
>Prepare PO's

IDK why in tech it's not like this, PM's in this industry are required to do a lot of work, that said, I think OP is probably complaining. It's better your boss not be a full fledged Dev. That shit causes way more problems.

i'm in uni so i have no experience with this but the 2 people i've seen who are into project management were embarrassing tools. if i have to work under one of these people i'll just quit and go live on a boat

>company going great, stories come through DirEng, whole team works on them, no PM needed
>first eng PM gets hired
>no changes at first, but she suddenly needs a bunch of underlings for some fucking reason
>hires like 4 other PMs
>all start taking random ass projects, engineers don't know which PM is in charge of which feature
>to solve problem head PM lady splits engineers up into "squads" or "tribes" or whatever the fuck you want to call them, each with their own PM
>shit becomes even more complicated because skill gradients are all over the place so now one team has great engineers while the other is full of fucking retards
>bugs go up
>morale goes down
i fucking hate PMs

Then why am I still an unemployed bum :(

are you straight, white, or male?

>i see staff that just ‘mark all read’ their emails without reading them and don’t look at slack unless it’s a DM.
yep that's me
all the shit i need to be concerned is on gitlab in form on the tracker as bug or feature request

There's a lot of bureaucracy in my company when trying to make changes outside of your team's domain. My PM is the one that goes and pesters those people so I'm not getting paid to sit around with my thumb up my ass.
Also, she has really fucking great tits and calves and thighs and her presence motivates me to work hard. I shit you not, I work probably 50% harder than before she became my PM. I don't really socialize with women, so when she says "good job", or "thank you", or she gives me a really big smile when I finish a task, it basically makes my whole week, and I really hate doing anything that would disappoint her.

Holy fucking shit. That's sad. Please don't stalk her ok bud?

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I don't need a programming cheerleader.

our PO started neglecting backlog grooming and lately, it's up to developers themselves to do that.

retrospective? he hasn't attended those ever except once

daily stand? takes too long and beginners always stall to remember the (((((((many))))))) things they did yday...

Did this bitch get punched in the mouth?

I won't. I know pursuing her can result in me losing my job, and I'd rather not have that happen. Plus, I can never get rejected if I never make a move on her. I like how things are between us, and I don't want it to change.

So you got the rare attractive one. Mine looks like a reject from the casting of Roller derby, and is so fucking lazy she doesn't do anything. Need to meet with the marketing/sales team to discuss something? Well shit i better break out the org chart because she's too busy attending the 449th planning meeting of the year.

God i hate women

sounds like one of those companies doing ((hybrid scrum)): obviously a lie and mistreat developers. real scrum would make their jobs harder and yours a bit easier. insist unpon hearing about their scrum practices at next interview. those are basically your rights..

who, the one in the pic or the one in my story

I like women, but I hate working with them.

The project manager where I work is a useless bag of shit who thinks he is gods holy answer to every little thing. Cunt does nothing, has no ability to do anything, spends his time doing god knows what and gets personally offended if you offer a suggestion that wasn't his own.

I'd say probably 50% of the PMs at my company are under 25 years old and conventionally attractive, fit, etc. There's definitely a "type" that management is trying to hire. The company has basically no attractive women outside of the PMs (including HR); the other women are generally uggo chinese/koreans, and there is literally one female developer out of about 90 total developers.
I complain every day to my manager (not my PM) and things have gotten better, but there's still lots of improvement and since I'm not the "domain expert", my opinion isn't valued until my manager restates the same things, but even then it's months before meetings between all the teams actually happen.

>domain expert
Funny story about that. I wrote a piece of software once that provides a clean interface to a message bus system, useful for event sourcing. A previous job I worked decided to implement the message bus system, but due to the weird bullshit politic at said company, I was not involved in its implementation.
When the system eventually worked its way to a point where I could interject or provide feedback or whatever the fuck you want to call it, they had already worked on a really dumb way of doing it, using my software, but not following any of the conventions i explicitly outlined in the documentation.
Manger said i wasnt the expert on it and the domain expert they brought in to solve the problem assured them that was the best solution.
Being told i'm not the expert in something i literally wrote pissed me the fuck off, so I slacked the CTO and whined at him.
We didn't have that manager much longer. Apparently the asshole didn't even check the author of said package

Engineers run the world. There's a reason tech companies are on top atm. I work as a dev at a non- tech company. The BAs/PMs just jack off all day.

and yet engineers are treated like shit at so many fucking companies.

>Force daily stand-up meetings
Standups should be about what you did yesterday (if it wasn't what you planned on doing yesterday), what you're doing today, and what you can't do today, that you'd like to, because other people/things are blocking you from doing so.
Doing this in a group setting allows team members to become more familiar with each other, so morale, and thus productivity goes up.
>Backlog grooming
If your team is composed of many specialists, or generalists and specialists, grooming allows everyone to input and accurately assess a difficulty score by offering differing perspectives. If the PM thinks a feature is easy, when the developers are saying it's hard, that's a sign of a bad PM.
>retrospective
If you can't point out the stupid waste of time bullshit, then this is another sign of a bad PM. Retrospectives should be emotionally safe; everyone should feel comfortable airing their grievances because the grievances aren't an attack against people, but against a process or a behavior. Using your example, if people are breaking production, that's a symptom of a bigger problem. Why is production allowed to break? Production should be 100% hands off, so no person can break production, and if anything breaks, it should have been caught in your development environment first. If you have perfect dev/prod parity (which is very easy given how stuff like AWS works), you'll catch these things easily, and the things that slip will get fixed, decreasing the likelihood of prod breaking in the future.

It really just sounds like you've only had bad PMs.

Why cant a standup be done in slack? If the company gives such a shit about morale, then they could give us free snacks or buy the team lunch on Friday. Having to hear the other people on my team groggily try to remember what they did the next morning, and stammer out "um-uhh-er i did a thing" is not conductive to good morale.

Again, why cant backlog grooming be done via slack? Then all the discussion is archived nicely for all to see and reference later

Protip: Take the 20 minutes before you leave work to write down notes about the day, and what you'll say in tomorrow's stand-up, that way you don't have to remember.
The problem with using slack is that it's ineffective if there's ever more than two people in a conversation. Conversing in person allows conversations to go quicker; you can look at someone and tell if they have something to say. You don't have to wait, watching the "Pajeet is typing..." message as someone tries to articulate their thoughts, only to never actually post. Finally, tone doesn't convey over text well at all, and backlog grooming can get confrontational, in my experience, and depending on the team members' disposition, they may interpret something you said in a way you did not mean, and you'll inevitably have an in-person conversation about that discussion, which doesn't really save any time at all.

I actually contracted for a company for a while that was using multiple slackbots, one for standup and one for backlog grooming.
The standup one messaged everyone a few hours before standup, asked the standard 3 what did you do, what will you do, what do you need help with, and then dumped em all in a channel and stored them on a website at a known time, say 10 am.
The backlog grooming would let the PM dump a ticket in, and ask the team for planning poker scores. Once everyone on the team had voted, the scores would be presented and the engineers could discuss why they voted what they did. If all engineers say its a 2 then presto, its a 2 and no discussion needed.

I wish I'd managed to swing a real job at that company

"why can't i just stay at my desk and never move" the post

Nah, i just want interruptions to actually be worth a shit. A boring ass meeting where most people just sit there waiting for it to end is not worth a shit

it's amazing how shit women are in these leadership roles.
>not actually telling you what they want
>implying you should just be able to tell their feelings
>emotionally unstable
>not actually supplying the team with what they need
I've been on projects where nothing was going anywhere until a male took over. I've met a lot of very capable women in testing, analysis and even dev work, but never a good leader, always some vague lazy bitch who plays mind games and shitty politics.

I've had one good female lead, and she was a kshatrya indian. But she wouldn't argue against the CTO, even when he was only giving mild pressure against something

>Mgr>We need XYZ
>CEO>Why
>Mgr>Nevermind we dont need it

>Project manager
>In agile team/project
Yeah seems like someone is swindling higher management feeding them false info to keep his job. The whole point of stuff like scrum is to make PM obsolete.

could be a bit of the indian culture coming out there. often will just tell you what you want to hear rather than the truth (arguing). probably why there are such a lot of shitty outsourced projects.

yeah agile and scrum is a lost cause now the normals have taken it there are courses on being "agile pm". it's not the thing it was originally.

Tbh, it always depends on the local implementation. Waterfall was originally not meant to be a thing you ride only once throughout the development, yet it became synonymous with hard pre-planned bureaucratic bullshit approach to development. You could easily call a spiral iterative waterfalling or shit.

Two of my ex colleagues were interested in project management. Chavvy, working class black women. I'm not being racist by mentioning that they were black, but as someone said earlier, maybe it's a culture thing. Anyway, one kept going on about how important she was and how she was a project manager and did X Y and Z, then she convinced her friend to do a degree in project management.

So her friend ended up enrolling at one of the shittest universities in the UK and started a degree in Project Management. She said she really really wanted it. What she meant was she wanted the qualification, she just couldn't hack the work.

It was a master's so still required commitment and intelligence, and after one term she found it too hard. In the second term she dropped out of the degree, citing "health reasons".

bet she still puts "project manager training" on her CV

I wish i was her so bad

using forums in an open source project was absolutely bliss. there was no noise so people didn't filter things out, and unlike slack you got well defined topics per thread and thought out posts so it wasnt chaotic/confusing.

hi Fitz

just "borrow" the clients list, develop competing product, and undercut your previous company :^)

gay

it would be cool to have forums at work but people would just completely ignore them. boomers think it's acceptable to ignore an email for 2 months

My company runs "blitzes" (weeks of overtime), and the PM emails the entire project group with a running total of how many bugs each individual developer has fixed so far that day.
They have an arbitrary target of bug fixes to get every day, if we meet it we get "Can we squeeze a few more fixes in?". If we don't meet it it's "Come on guys we need a bug push this afternoon!".
Fuck you you worthless fucking cunts.
Don't ruin your projects with poor management then throw the devs at it to fix it up.

I miss waterfall, it meant good requirement documents.
Agile doesn't fit our company at all (bug projects, few releases, high risk failures), and we've got the worst implementation imaginable.

>Suggest that they be moved to something like Slack or Email
That's retarded.
If daily meetings are pointless for your project - make them weekly/monthly/whatever. Knowing what the fuck is everyone doing is a good thing.
>they'll put pressure to lower the estimate
They have to convince you the feature is faster and easier to implement than you think.
You have to convince them it's harder and more time consuming than they think.
If both of you take it seriously, you'll end up with realistic requirements and PM will have a proper understanding of how long things generally take.

It's normal. You might think it's a form of conflict but it really isn't.
>But its not anonymous
If you aren't a faggot, instead of calling other people out you will say what things you personally did wrong and what can be made better.
If there was a major fuck up, chances are it cannot be blamed on a single person. If it can - here's something you should already change in your work flow.

you're doing agile® wrong™

Our dev team would be so much better without the one female dev who doesn't do shit now that she has a kid and uses it as an excuse for everything.

>If both of you take it seriously, you'll end up with realistic requirements and PM will have a proper understanding of how long things generally take.
haggling over time estimates. pure corporate bullshit.

I like Agile on paper but my practical experience with it had it make an impression of some swindle scheme.
>The client asks for a thing.
>Team makes a pile of shit in two weeks
>Client approves the pile of shit and agrees on the pile of shit improvement plan for the next two weeks
>Team improves pile of shit over the course of two weeks
>Repeat until the client went bankrupt

Ultimately, you have an always "satisfied" customer who literally never receives the actual thing they did initially ask for.

lol this is literally how every single consultancy works
1. UNDERESTIMATE
2. OVERCHARGE
3. UNDERDELIVER

I see where you're coming from but that's generally not an issue when you can deliberately explain what you have to do to implement a feature and how much every step will take.

The whole point system is there to give both PM and the team a rough estimate of their "speed". If a project lasts more than a month, you can reference the points spent on previous tasks quite reliably.

Oh shit, that's my scheme that I accidentally created by being lazy and terrible at my job. I never knew I was actually a genius.

Meanwhile in the blue collar side of things:

>Waste hour of each day on coffee meeting
The good part is that it allows people to get to the enterprise, start up machines, then change.
And it allows for leaders to actually show up and talk about priorities instead of just randomly taking orders from the online questboard.
Its generally a waste of time. But the opposite is far far worse, where the office drones or leaders arrive half a hour or hour after the actual employs. And will then take up random calls because they failed to do research while selling the projects.
>Backlog grooming
Thank fucking god its not in blue collar.
I've had enough of basic shit like forging papers to ensure false paper trails, or to poison documentation to increase billing.
>Retrospective
Billing or sales do not work without it. But its only for larger projects, or for when heavy duty machines fail in the field.
Or sales fuck up estimates completely.
In smaller corporations its a complete fucking mess, because the margin isn't high enough. In larger corporation you need to throw salesforces under busses at first and best opportunity, otherwise they will repeat their errors.

This is for corporations that attach gigantic vacuum pumps on trucks, and then go around with the worlds largest vacuums doing anything that it out competes in manpower hours.
I guess the only difference is that all the equipment is so expensive long term, this kind of corporation is always just half a year away from being rankrupt due poor investments. Projects being 1 hour jobs in 90% of cases also help, since it leads to a granular workflow of new projects and locations.
I've seen similar trends when we do projects that lasts months, where politic bullshit or meddling stops workers from just using the equipment.

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Delivering a partial thing in 2 weeks so they can use it and see if you are going in the right direction is better than to wait 5 months to see what you did and then tell you it isn't what they wanted.

Of course this is an endless cycle. There's always something to improve. They have to draw the line between functionality and how long the project is gonna take. At some point it just doesn't make sense to keep developing new features.

yes

Yeah that's the idea and I guess it's a good one. Although at the beginning of the project this usually consists of erecting a useless facade to buy you time to build the actual product...

Do we work on the same team?

lmao you incel code monkeys are just mad cos where smart enough to get 3x the money for half the work. your pathetic

>PM's promise function to high ranking individuals
>"user we need to do this"
>"it's not possible with our current infrastructure"
>pm's fw

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Well the idea of agile was to be more honest with the client and with yourself about the progress I guess it's also a job of the PM to avoid falling into fake it until you make it.

Isn't that what grooming is for?

my PM's are a special kind of stupid

PM here for large projects. Every developer works on two to six different projects in any given week. It's a horrible setup no doubt, but dealing with the incompetence of clients and the autism of developers only multiplies the problem tenfold.

Sometimes all hands meetings are nice. Everybody working on their own thing supposedly have no questions when asked individually or in chat, but you bring them together in a meeting and rile them up with questions, and everybody realizes the disconnect between their individual parts and start arguing with each other. You let them go for a bit, summarize the agreed changes and you just saved two weeks of rework later on with a 30 minute meeting. Lots of them probably left the meeting thinking that it was another useless meeting, but 9 out of 10 developers won't see the bigger picture even if you explained it to them twice.

You don't need PMs to do development. But you need PMs in any case where there's more than two developers and you want everybody to actually get paid, and the customer to get their software and actually launch in production. When left alone, developers would constantly work on rewriting an insignificant part of the program and never deliver or launch. Developers who are able to actually get things launched are the only ones worth their salary and will quickly rise through the ranks.

Sadly majority of my work gets reduced to not letting developers run amok by having them estimate their work, pushing barely acceptable software out, and tracking and explaining the spent budget to higher-ups.

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I'm reading that your PMs write your stories? How fucking dumb is that? Where I work the actual team writes them with the PO, and PMs have no say in estimate or things like that.

I agree PMs seem somewhat useless. Daily meetings are useful but we can do them without PMs. Retros are cool though.

"Stories" or a "Story" is just a terminology used to denote a event.
Other such words include 'Timeline' and 'Order of events'.
So when they are talking about such a thing, you are essentially looking at low level paper trail forgery.
>Project X has 9 stages
>As per of Date YY.YY we assume each stage will take 2 weeks each
>So we will ship in 18 weeks
>We had a meeting, and nobody objected to this
This is the basic version of forging a meeting log. To fake it. You don't take proper notes, and write what you want, making fictional events take place.
So stuff will look good if somebody reviews it, and its on time.

So if the 'storyline' ends up wrong, heads of the PO needs to roll. Otherwise you might have a PO who can't even fucking communicate.

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Sum of this thread is pretty much a reason why I left extremely well-paid PM job and just joined the military and it was best decision of my life.
>trying to communicate with completely autistic devs
>trying to calm down angered clients when the false promises made by salesniggers come to light
>balancing on the budget tighter than teenage asian's cunt
>completely fucking retarded corporate inside politicking and general backstabbing shittery
>trying real hard to not see how young female "office assistants" are literally and figuratively sucking dicks to smelly older high management fatsos
>UNENDING clashes with hamplanet HR turbocunts
Jesus Christ how I hated that job. Never more.

I am a PM.

If there's a project, I break down the project into chunks that require 4 hours each. I make sure that if chunks need to be coordinated, that the devs have comms channels available to coordinate. I also coordinate testing and make sure that ultimately, all chunks work together to create a working finished project.

Sounds like you are all working with PMs that are way too involved.

Hey, it worked for Shockley.. I mean Fairchild.. I mean Intel

Agile and story points specifically are the stupidest fucking idea in corporate culture in the last 25 years. Agile has become just another word for micromanagement. PMs love it because it dumbs the project down into something their pea sized brain can comprehend.

Story points are fucking stupid because the weight of pts is arbitrary and different for each person. Why would you not just give an hourly estimate like every other profession in the history of time. Fuck this shit, its opposite of what agile was originally intended to do. Just like everything else, it gets co opted and fucked in the ass by non tech management.

This

4 hour chunks? Surely you mean 40. Anything that is simple enough to do in only 4 hours isnt worth the effort to manage. More proofthis shit is just micromanaging at the expense of produxtivity.

I worked at a company as a dev with shitty metrics like this.

We had support engineers, who helped clients with our SDK. They got graded on their "efficiency", eg how many messages they'd have to send to resolve a problem.

Instead of measuring efficiency, this simply discouraged support guys from taking on difficult looking tickets (usually from big fish customers), and it discouraged actually responding to customers in general.

Metrics in software largely don't work. To manage a software project while actually being able to givr accurate annual revirws you have to

>be an engineer
>assess value at a high level

That's it. Counting bugs, efficiency, or lines of code doesnt work.