I'm the OP. Good question. I had this come up with many people and I wrote a longer response[1]. The short of it is, for small (2-5 person projects) this is a

I'm the OP. Good question. I had this come up with many people and I wrote a longer response[1]. The short of it is, for small (2-5 person projects) this is a valuable skill to have. And a project manager would probably add _more_ work on top of it. If you think of a small team, let's say a tech startup with 5 people. How many of them are project managers versus developers? And would you rather a project manager with little context on your work "nag" you multiple times a day, or would you rather have control how you and the team do minimum effort project management? These are exactly the type of teams a typical project is run by. Also, most of the engineers are product-minded engineers[2]. In highly autonomous tech companies I see a small ratio of project managers - likely 1:50-1:30 with engineers. In companies where devs have little autonomy, this ratio goes up. I know a large, well-known consumer bank, where there are almost as many project managers, scrum masters, agile coaches and the managers of these people, as there are developers. Developers are not allowed to make any decisions - that's why all these other people are there! In all fairness, this company is spending loads of money with a consultancy to figure out how they can speed up software delivery, which is... slow. Who thought? [1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/a-team-where-everyone-is-a-leader#tensions-and-challenges https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/a-team-where-everyone-is-... [2] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-product-minded-engineer/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-product-minded-engine...