I don't agree. This isn't to disparage the job of project managers, but I think you're going too far in the opposite direction and disparaging the job of develo

I don't agree. This isn't to disparage the job of project managers, but I think you're going too far in the opposite direction and disparaging the job of developers too much here. Quoting from the top-level comment: > Writing good code - readable, maintainable, secure code with few bugs - on the other hand is really hard. How is a project manager going to help with this? This is clearly the responsibility of the programmer, not the PM. > the hard part is talking to the customer and figuring out what they actually want you to do and then keep up with them changing their mind every four weeks and still somehow manage to ship something that roughly does what it currently is supposed to do. I wonder if you interpreted this too literally. Sure, the act of talking to the customer is itself a bit challenging in some cases, but I think the point is that it's especially challenging to engineer a system subject to changing requirements because if you're not good and careful you could build yourself into a corner. A good PM can help a ton here by figuring out how to talk to the customer and spending a lot of time doing so. But I don't think there's any reason to believe that's actually harder than building the requested system, and if any requirement does change, it's not going to affect the PM directly at all -- it will be an order of magnitude harder for the developers to deal with that than the PM. Finally, I think developers taking on management roles is exactly what's needed, and it's exactly what happens in most top tech companies. Sure, if you look at extremely high ranking VPs at a place like Google, you'll find many ex-McKinsey Harvard MBAs (alongside engineers as well), but in general the middle management at these places is composed of programmers to a very significant extent.