To be fair shouldn't your manger be the one shielding you from all this crap. Thats how things work in my job - which is in the "non-software" engineering worl

To be fair shouldn't your manger be the one shielding you from all this crap. Thats how things work in my job - which is in the "non-software" engineering world. I'm an engineer I do technical work it is the responsibility of my manager, (who is a former engineer) to sit in on all the meetings so I can get on with my work if something relevent to me or our team comes up he disseminates it to us. We had an issue last year. Our team was working on a largish project and we had one of those micromanaging PM's who was bugging a collegaue and I, similar thing to your complaints constainly demanding status updates from us trying to sneak scope/specification changes through the backdoor etc. All it took was one complaint to our manager and he tore the meddling PM a new one. After that everything came down through the approriate chanels and we were able to deal with things in peace, we didn't have to waste hours dealing with an incompetant project manager. I'm not usually a fan of "top heavy" management structures but in this case perfect example of management working as intended.