3 ms·
A good programmer is as valuable to the team as a good project manager (and vice-versa) but the project manager's work will be explainable to corporate in a way
by drivingmenuts 15y ago
A good programmer is as valuable to the team as a good project manager (and vice-versa) but the project manager's work will be explainable to corporate in a way that the programmer's work isn't.
Suits (and yes, I know this is an us-vs-them mentality) understand charts and numbers and projections, etc., but rarely give a damn about what actually has to happen to earn their quarterly profit. Project managers can produce enough of those to warm the cold pits of any executive's heart; programmers can point to lines of code and get a confused, annoyed look and a trip out the door.
It's not that executives are, by nature, evil or bad people (OK, not Hitlerian evil), they just don't worry about the tiny details.
- mgkimsal 15y agoGiven the hierarchical nature of most companies, developers tend to be at the bottom rung. They've got project managers above them, then department managers above them. Almost by definition, anything a developer is working on is a "detail" (and can often be regarded as 'tiny' in comparison to the whole of a project or department). Doesn't matter if that one 'tiny' detail can actually close down the company or not, by the very nature of how projects and depts are structured, it's set up to be an uphill battle to get noticed and get heard from a dev point of view.