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I didn't read the text, but I'm glad to see people switching to project management. I've been one myself for 16 years, until I found that it was a dying career

I didn't read the text, but I'm glad to see people switching to project management. I've been one myself for 16 years, until I found that it was a dying career or, at least, a career obfuscated by alternatives like "product owner", "customer success" or just by the fact teams are getting more and more self-managed. I've seen a consistent reduction of job openings for project managers. Some specific niche oriented job boards don't even have "project manager" as option to select in the opening creation form. So four years ago I left my last project management job to never look back nor forward, as there wasn't much to look at anyway.

visviva 4y ago
What did you switch to?
- rodolphoarruda 4y ago
  Product manager.
  - MiddleEndian 4y ago
    As someone who has been in the industry long enough that I should know, but I always just call people PMs and never delved past that... what is the distinction between being a Project Manager and Product Manager?
    - LeSaucy 4y ago
      I have found that product managers are more motivated towards sales and marketing of a product/solution, project managers are more logistical and keeping people informed.
    - eatonphil 4y ago
      In companies that do product development, project managers are responsible for schedules/timelines/reporting. Product managers are responsible for what is the problem, what is to build. It's a massive difference. Good product managers are experts of the market, have vision for the company and product. Project managers focus more on bookkeeping.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      It varies depending on company, type of product, etc. However, in my experience with mostly computer systems hardware, project managers were more internally focused and concerned with minutiae of schedules, resources, dependencies, etc. Whereas product managers interfaced with sales, customers, and--depending or the organization related groups like product marketing, marketing communications, etc. But PM/PMM roles can vary a fair bit.
    - rodolphoarruda 4y ago
      The most relevant distinction between the two from the company's perspective, IMHO, is that the product manager is often seen as potential revenue generating agent, whereas the project manager is pure operational cost. One would have to articulate a lot to make a point about a project manager being directly associated with sales/revenue etc. -- the top line. "Oh yeah, the project manager can increase customer satisfaction and then contribute to upselling, especially in companies focused on farming and not much on hunting customers!" -- I agree, but it's rare now.
    - tremon 4y ago
      It's pretty much in the difference between a project and a product: by most definitions, a project is a tool for change in an organization, and has a limited lifetime and a limited scope. A product, on the other hand, is a tool for performing some business function (either internally for staff or externally through sales), and its scope can be whatever the business needs. Typically, a project manager has authority over resource allocation and resource planning, but must defer to the stakeholders for everything else (most importantly, for actual design/implementation decisions). A product manager has authority over the complete lifecycle of his product, including design, implementation and resource allocation.
      - digisign 4y ago
        Finally there's Program Manager... a 'program' being a continuously running project. Think, a government program for...
    - andi999 4y ago
      I talked to a 'pure' project manager for a big company, basically this guy went to a 2 hour project meeting then to his secretary got a new folder and into the next 2 hour project meeting. Basically ticking boxes related to gantt charts. This is the far end of project manager, a fully political position with not too much expertise in the specific project required.
    - corrral 4y ago
      Project manager: - Reads Jira (or whatever) and moves things around (yes, they may also add things sometimes, but I'm drawing a general distinction). - Gantt charts. - Tracks project status, communicates it upward. - May also do some communicating expectations downward. - Translates blunt assessments of the project's progress into managerese. - May have some responsibility for keeping development processes going, especially ones that involve lots of communication (think: Agile shit, or just project status meetings generally) - Helps unblock process-related shit. Product manager: - Writes to Jira a lot. - Does market research, or works closely with those who do. - Guides the direction of the product (e.g. which feature do we tackle next, do we pivot). - Works closely with key stakeholders (clients, product owners, domain experts) to determine that direction. - Sells that direction to management and such. - May have some significant sway on final decisions for e.g. design. - May do quite a bit of business-model analysis.
      - Unbeliever69 4y ago
        My your account, a project manager is a plumber. Nice analogy.
  - esel2k 4y ago
    Same here. Was project manager before now product manager and would never go back. As project manager I was only looking after budget and timelines and creating gantt charts for management. As a product manager I read market analysis, run customer research, talk to partner companies, run workshops, create a vision and discuss various potential solution with dev teams and others. I think the role of project manager is dying for a good reason. Developers can organize themselves and it is more important to have that leading person motivating the dev teams with interesting problems while respecting them -> my approach. The rest is shared between product mamager, senior developers maybe some shared delivery lead resources or the engineering manager.
tmountain 4y ago
Some companies seem to be glomming project management into the list of job responsibilities for the dev lead on the team. Oftentimes this results in a role where the dev lead is 1/4 project management (or scrum master), 1/4 engineer, 1/4 people manager, and 1/4 hiring manager. Say what you will about it, but I think the trend will continue as organizations try to cut costs with the coming economic downturn.
- BFLpL0QNek 4y ago
  Noticed this to and it’s not great. The person is spread to thin and there’s a lot of different skills to do each role well. The best project manager I had was a film producer moonlighting as a pm between films. The film producing experience, tight deadlines, tight budgets, scheduling, lots of cross functional teams, bringing them together at the right time etc really carried over well.
- wembeley 4y ago
  I don't believe this is strictly a cost-cutting measure. I think companies are realizing subconsciously that people who can do this are worth their weight in gold (although I might be biased as one of them) because they can put together the whole picture of software development. You can certainly achieve the same effect with a well-functioning team, but that's harder to manufacture than hiring one person who can put the whole thing together in their head. Of course the tradeoff is what you said: these people get burnt out if not carefully managed and they are probably less optimal than they could be performing any one of those roles in isolation. But the value of getting a synthesis across those functions and moving a project in the right direction is extremely valuable.
  - watwut 4y ago
    The problem with that setup is that such one person is super rarely actually keeping all those roles in their head. At least one of those roles suffers a lot, usually more of them.
  - vsareto 4y ago
    If someone's that skilled, you might be able to double up on slower remote jobs and collect two salaries instead of getting one position with the demands of two jobs but with the salary of 1x to 1.9x of a slower job. There seems to be diminishing returns for salary increases with responsibility increases.
snidane 4y ago
Many times non-technical project managers were useless. Just overpaid glorified secretaries trying to take meeting notes, often losing valuable information in translation. It made sense to rebrand to other job titles so as not to attract the same wrong people full of certifications which were irrelevant to software dev. In the end I can see it being named project management again, but only after the wrong crowd is weeded out.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  > Many times non-technical project managers were useless. Just overpaid glorified secretaries trying to take meeting notes, often losing valuable information in translation. I'll also point out that this stereotype is widely accepted by engineers, so even if you are a former engineer and do have the technical chops, many engineering teams out there will treat you like a secretary anyway and disregard your technical judgment. I'm a project manager but have been coding for longer than a lot of engineers I work with have been alive. I've seen the spectrum of engineers from great collaborators who treat you as a [technical and professional] equal, to arrogant assholes who treat you like you're their note-taker/janitor/servant. For a concrete example, I remember a project manager arguing with a senior developer about what a particular wireless specification required, the project manager had a Bernie Sanders moment when she had to remind him, "I wrote the damn spec!"
plebuhn 4y ago
I agree that project management is dying as a field, I think it is a natural reaction to the top-down command and control style of project management popular in the early 2000s in favor of more agile, self-orienting teams. I do see a new flavor of project management coming back branded as technical program management, which is more a flexible position responsible for the large cross-functional projects while filling the gaps of a dev team via process development, facilitator, and/or scrum master. Usually, this role is only necessary for large orgs with multiple teams or highly regulated industries that require a lot of coordination.
lliamander 4y ago
What do you do now? In general, I would consider this trend healthy. Managing your time and your priorities, communicating with stakeholders, etc. are all skills that all engineers should develop over time, even if just for their own personal work. At the team level, shared processes and priorities should be guided by a tech lead/engineering manager who has the incentives to keep process overhead to a minimum. Ideally, once a process has been put into place there should be very little for a dedicated project manager to do on a day-to-day basis. Where project management skills shine most is when the work involves multiple teams and the "lowest common manager" is either too high up the org chart to be involved in the details or doesn't exist (because the coordination is between separate companies). This usually manifests as "customer success" or "technical program management" roles, though they could just as easily be called "project management".

visviva 4y ago

What did you switch to?

rodolphoarruda 4y ago
Product manager.
- MiddleEndian 4y ago
  As someone who has been in the industry long enough that I should know, but I always just call people PMs and never delved past that... what is the distinction between being a Project Manager and Product Manager?
  - LeSaucy 4y ago
    I have found that product managers are more motivated towards sales and marketing of a product/solution, project managers are more logistical and keeping people informed.
  - eatonphil 4y ago
    In companies that do product development, project managers are responsible for schedules/timelines/reporting. Product managers are responsible for what is the problem, what is to build. It's a massive difference. Good product managers are experts of the market, have vision for the company and product. Project managers focus more on bookkeeping.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    It varies depending on company, type of product, etc. However, in my experience with mostly computer systems hardware, project managers were more internally focused and concerned with minutiae of schedules, resources, dependencies, etc. Whereas product managers interfaced with sales, customers, and--depending or the organization related groups like product marketing, marketing communications, etc. But PM/PMM roles can vary a fair bit.
  - rodolphoarruda 4y ago
    The most relevant distinction between the two from the company's perspective, IMHO, is that the product manager is often seen as potential revenue generating agent, whereas the project manager is pure operational cost. One would have to articulate a lot to make a point about a project manager being directly associated with sales/revenue etc. -- the top line. "Oh yeah, the project manager can increase customer satisfaction and then contribute to upselling, especially in companies focused on farming and not much on hunting customers!" -- I agree, but it's rare now.
  - tremon 4y ago
    It's pretty much in the difference between a project and a product: by most definitions, a project is a tool for change in an organization, and has a limited lifetime and a limited scope. A product, on the other hand, is a tool for performing some business function (either internally for staff or externally through sales), and its scope can be whatever the business needs. Typically, a project manager has authority over resource allocation and resource planning, but must defer to the stakeholders for everything else (most importantly, for actual design/implementation decisions). A product manager has authority over the complete lifecycle of his product, including design, implementation and resource allocation.
    - digisign 4y ago
      Finally there's Program Manager... a 'program' being a continuously running project. Think, a government program for...
  - andi999 4y ago
    I talked to a 'pure' project manager for a big company, basically this guy went to a 2 hour project meeting then to his secretary got a new folder and into the next 2 hour project meeting. Basically ticking boxes related to gantt charts. This is the far end of project manager, a fully political position with not too much expertise in the specific project required.
  - corrral 4y ago
    Project manager: - Reads Jira (or whatever) and moves things around (yes, they may also add things sometimes, but I'm drawing a general distinction). - Gantt charts. - Tracks project status, communicates it upward. - May also do some communicating expectations downward. - Translates blunt assessments of the project's progress into managerese. - May have some responsibility for keeping development processes going, especially ones that involve lots of communication (think: Agile shit, or just project status meetings generally) - Helps unblock process-related shit. Product manager: - Writes to Jira a lot. - Does market research, or works closely with those who do. - Guides the direction of the product (e.g. which feature do we tackle next, do we pivot). - Works closely with key stakeholders (clients, product owners, domain experts) to determine that direction. - Sells that direction to management and such. - May have some significant sway on final decisions for e.g. design. - May do quite a bit of business-model analysis.
    - Unbeliever69 4y ago
      My your account, a project manager is a plumber. Nice analogy.
- esel2k 4y ago
  Same here. Was project manager before now product manager and would never go back. As project manager I was only looking after budget and timelines and creating gantt charts for management. As a product manager I read market analysis, run customer research, talk to partner companies, run workshops, create a vision and discuss various potential solution with dev teams and others. I think the role of project manager is dying for a good reason. Developers can organize themselves and it is more important to have that leading person motivating the dev teams with interesting problems while respecting them -> my approach. The rest is shared between product mamager, senior developers maybe some shared delivery lead resources or the engineering manager.

tmountain 4y ago

Some companies seem to be glomming project management into the list of job responsibilities for the dev lead on the team. Oftentimes this results in a role where the dev lead is 1/4 project management (or scrum master), 1/4 engineer, 1/4 people manager, and 1/4 hiring manager. Say what you will about it, but I think the trend will continue as organizations try to cut costs with the coming economic downturn.

BFLpL0QNek 4y ago
Noticed this to and it’s not great. The person is spread to thin and there’s a lot of different skills to do each role well. The best project manager I had was a film producer moonlighting as a pm between films. The film producing experience, tight deadlines, tight budgets, scheduling, lots of cross functional teams, bringing them together at the right time etc really carried over well.
wembeley 4y ago
I don't believe this is strictly a cost-cutting measure. I think companies are realizing subconsciously that people who can do this are worth their weight in gold (although I might be biased as one of them) because they can put together the whole picture of software development. You can certainly achieve the same effect with a well-functioning team, but that's harder to manufacture than hiring one person who can put the whole thing together in their head. Of course the tradeoff is what you said: these people get burnt out if not carefully managed and they are probably less optimal than they could be performing any one of those roles in isolation. But the value of getting a synthesis across those functions and moving a project in the right direction is extremely valuable.
- watwut 4y ago
  The problem with that setup is that such one person is super rarely actually keeping all those roles in their head. At least one of those roles suffers a lot, usually more of them.
- vsareto 4y ago
  If someone's that skilled, you might be able to double up on slower remote jobs and collect two salaries instead of getting one position with the demands of two jobs but with the salary of 1x to 1.9x of a slower job. There seems to be diminishing returns for salary increases with responsibility increases.

snidane 4y ago

Many times non-technical project managers were useless. Just overpaid glorified secretaries trying to take meeting notes, often losing valuable information in translation. It made sense to rebrand to other job titles so as not to attract the same wrong people full of certifications which were irrelevant to software dev. In the end I can see it being named project management again, but only after the wrong crowd is weeded out.

ryandrake 4y ago
> Many times non-technical project managers were useless. Just overpaid glorified secretaries trying to take meeting notes, often losing valuable information in translation. I'll also point out that this stereotype is widely accepted by engineers, so even if you are a former engineer and do have the technical chops, many engineering teams out there will treat you like a secretary anyway and disregard your technical judgment. I'm a project manager but have been coding for longer than a lot of engineers I work with have been alive. I've seen the spectrum of engineers from great collaborators who treat you as a [technical and professional] equal, to arrogant assholes who treat you like you're their note-taker/janitor/servant. For a concrete example, I remember a project manager arguing with a senior developer about what a particular wireless specification required, the project manager had a Bernie Sanders moment when she had to remind him, "I wrote the damn spec!"

plebuhn 4y ago

I agree that project management is dying as a field, I think it is a natural reaction to the top-down command and control style of project management popular in the early 2000s in favor of more agile, self-orienting teams. I do see a new flavor of project management coming back branded as technical program management, which is more a flexible position responsible for the large cross-functional projects while filling the gaps of a dev team via process development, facilitator, and/or scrum master. Usually, this role is only necessary for large orgs with multiple teams or highly regulated industries that require a lot of coordination.

lliamander 4y ago

What do you do now? In general, I would consider this trend healthy. Managing your time and your priorities, communicating with stakeholders, etc. are all skills that all engineers should develop over time, even if just for their own personal work. At the team level, shared processes and priorities should be guided by a tech lead/engineering manager who has the incentives to keep process overhead to a minimum. Ideally, once a process has been put into place there should be very little for a dedicated project manager to do on a day-to-day basis. Where project management skills shine most is when the work involves multiple teams and the "lowest common manager" is either too high up the org chart to be involved in the details or doesn't exist (because the coordination is between separate companies). This usually manifests as "customer success" or "technical program management" roles, though they could just as easily be called "project management".