> I remember while I was working for a big financial firm as a software developer. I kept asking myself why we were doing very little coding. Most of my time wa

> I remember while I was working for a big financial firm as a software developer. I kept asking myself why we were doing very little coding. Most of my time was spent attending useless meetings, preparing boring slides, making goofy excel sheets and Gantt-charts and maybe 1–2 hours of coding a day if I was even lucky. The software that I and my team worked on was a basically a javascript web application that monitored and collected details about financial transactions in the company. Believe me when I tell you that I could have worked on the entire software myself in 5 months. The entire solution could not have been more than 24,000 lines of code (including lots of generated code). My team spent nearly 3 years building this software, most of the time spent in meetings, bickering over the pettiest feature like, if we should display certain data using a particular chart and what colour the chart should be. Theoretically a Product Manager solves this problem for you: they are given the authority to be decisive about the details of a project, its scope, and they sit through all the boring meetings and manage the status update bureaucracy while working with the developers to actually build something.