No shade to any comrades here in that role. I’m just venting because 1) I hate my job and am officially “quiet quitting,” and 2) I’ve sent out over 120 job applications today and I’m fuckign tired.
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I have a good project manager and he’s receiving pressure from our VP to become a bad one. “Oh, you give your team autonomy and a sense of ownership over their work? Well, we’re gonna need you to implement more time tracking so we can charge our clients appropriately.”
They’re just assholes who can’t get over the fact that working from home may allow us to work fewer hours while remaining equally productive.
I built all the tracking stuff at my job. It’s got a really shiny interface and looks super legit for when the owner walks by, but I bullshit all the numbers on the backend so no one looks bad
(He was gonna implement tracking no matter what, but when I stepped up to build the system it saved him like $1000/month and let us make up our own metrics)
That’s the thing the metrics never need to be real just need to make the person at the top happy enough to never ask questions.
My boss: “We need to change how we report these new metrics, they’re making us look bad.”
Me: “Okay” adds 20% to all of them “How’s that”
As long as work is being done everything is fine, just make sure they have something pretty to put in their powerpoints
Lies, damned lies, and statistics
One thing I will give my boss is that when we had a new guy with noticably bad metrics (like one billable item in 3 months) he listened to me when I said it was our fault.
Kept the guy on under my wing and showed that he just hadn’t been trained properly. Let him know the next day that he had a month of my keeping him on even if he just called out every day to find a new job, now he’s like a huge part of the company.
That experience alone was enough to make it so the only way to get fired here is to literally bring a gun to work or be such a chauvinist that you get the can.
That’s fucking praxis right there.
you obfuscated the calculation in the code so it’s hard to turn it back around on you, right?
It’s all just docker shit sadly. But I got all the relationships between services set up to be basically impossible to replicate.
I’m also the only person in the whole company who knows anything about programming, so there’s no chance they can replace me and I’m doing things so outside normal procedures that unless they can find someone willing to untangle my shit for 3x my salary they’re stuck with me lol
Nice! Well, it’s nice that they’re a good PM, sucks about the higher ups. In all my jobs, I’ve either functioned as a PM without the title or PMP certification, or the ones I’ve worked with have served no purpose to the project, and I basically filled out their roles just by being the one to run the project (SaaS implementations). I’ve been told a good PM can make a world of difference on a project, but I’m yet to see it
That doesn’t sound like how a PM works in my business. They don’t have any “power” in the team, they just organize and connect with the customer and other teams.
Some are really good at it, but most of them do not push back on insane deadlines.
120 job applications in a day is a lot, good job. i get burnt out just sending a couple
big same, i consider it a really productive day if i manage to send like 6. manifesting job offers for all of us
Thanks! I’ve been hitting Indeed and (mostly) Glassdoor. A lot of them have that ‘easy apply’ system, so I’ve just been searching on a few relative keywords and applying to basically everything posted in the last month. Got a list of another 10-15 for tomorrow that I’ll have to sit down and actually spend more than 2 seconds doing.
I think LinkedIn jobs is better for tech roles nowadays if you have the energy to start a new application stream
Don’t need to setup a profile, just make an account to search for the jobs and apply on their website
Thanks, I actually nuked my LinkedIn a few months ago by posting Stalin pics, so I’ll make a new one soon
The power of the
is can be very overwhelming.
A good PM makes all the difference but its rare to come across any. My current one has the memory of a goldfish and is more interested in telling me how to code even though he’s a novice programmer who’s never done anything professionally.
god the ones who think they can do your job but clearly don’t know shit are the fucking worst
So far at my current job I’ve dealt with five different PMs.
The first one is really good. Used to be a dev. Big fuck-work-energy. They handle all the administrative bullshit that I don’t know or care about. They check in on the devs every now and then. Lots of constructive feedback and praise. They managed to make some kind of contract with the customer that pretty enabled me to do jack shit and get paid for it most of the time without anyone raising eyebrows.
The second one is good, pretty average PM. Used to be a dev themselves since the 90’s, so they understand the developer’s point of view. Easy to work with.
The third one is just kind of there. Handles the admin stuff and that’s it. The devs (i.e. I) do most of the interactions with the customer, since the PM doesn’t really know wtf the project is even about.
The fourth one isn’t even there. Sometimes I don’t even know if they’ve quit or what, because I never see or hear from them. The ultimate quiet quitter. Once they showed up to some friday afternoon function, said “sup?” chugged a beer and devoured a pizza in ten seconds (rolled it up and ate it like a burrito!!), and went home. My main inspiration, my number one career goal.
The fifth one was garbage though. Made all sorts of unrealistic promises to the customers and took it out on the devs when we couldn’t deliver in time. They quit at some point, and the project transfered to PM #1.
I’m not entirely sure if there’s a significant difference between project manager and program manager but I’d be happy to refer you to the open program manager positions (and any other relevant ones to your skills/experience) in my company
Oh hell yeah, please DM me!
Hearing the things my partner has been through on various projects I gotta agree with this meme.
I just hope nobody here is actually a PM, cause I dont wanna hurt feelings
That’s fair! I’m sure there are decent ones out there, it’s finding them that seems to be difficult in no small due to tech culture (and especially combined with corpo culture). 😔
I’m a mason turned construction PM and agree with you. It’s usually a person without the technical skills needed to understand how the project actually happens. Now that I’m only doing pre-construction bullshit I feel so much happier being out of the operations side.
I concur very much. Can’t even describe how jealous I am that my team lead just quit, I wish it was me. Now I have to take his role at basically the busiest time on the project, fucking hell
Godspeed comrade
I got asked by my immediate boss this morning what I do all day. I think they’re probably trying to figure out how to let me go without completely fucking themselves out of stalling ALL American projects, since I’m the only stateside specialist in this application (that I have no clue how to work since there was never formal training, and every clients needs are different).
Jokes on them I’m the biggest time thief at the company.
Gotta love that kind of question. It’s like, shouldn’t they be aware of what you do? It says more about them if they don’t know!
I mean I think its more of an ‘I expected this Tobe further along’ sorta thing, but yeah. I shut it down with a simple “things take time.”
A good PM is golden and can do so much to help a team work (like running interference for you. OK, mostly running interference for you). That also doesn’t tend to line up with making management feel like they are extracting the maximum possible value from a team, so they tend to get removed from that position
Anyway, godspeed. May you find a job you don’t hate
A good PM can also make sure a team gets resources they need, that workloads are achievable, that there’s enough slack for emergencies, and pick up on bottlenecks and frustrations before they happen. Since I’m shit at organising I insist on my team having at least a de facto Project Manager as part of my continuing philosophy that the best manager works as little as possible, because if you have to manage something something has gone wrong.
All of this assumes there’s a functioning company behind them, though.
I don’t have words to make your situation better, but hope you have some good responses from sending out applications. Most managers suck and are an obstacle to doing our jobs, in any industry, so I feel your pain
Thanks! I’m just venting here, and sharing that meme made me feel a little better.
Holy
that’s a lot of applications.
sends all the good vibes I can muster - thanks comrade, hoping to hear back from a few soon! I’ve got more on my radar, and a new LinkedIn account to make tomorrow, so that’ll be a thing I do soon too. It’s all just a fucking numbers game, innit?
It really fucking is. Worse yet is the job postings where you get to an interview and find out actually they want a different fucking job but hr refuses to change the description to be technically accurate. It’s infuriating.
Good luck, I hope the search goes well
Gotta keep rolling that
till you get that crit hit.
Every day I am in awe of our limitless supply of emojis
Somebody’s gotta make a “IS OVER 9000!!!” emoji to properly reply to comments like yours.
I have seen lot’s of fail sons and fail daughters end up in the PM role. If you dig into their past, they have an ivy league degree, come from money, are connected to an investor/shareholder in some weird way, and are totally incompetent.
That said, I’ve also worked with some really good PMs that made my job as a programmer/capitalist task master (manager of programmers) easier.
edit: Just realized OP is referencing Project Manager, not Product. Although, after 10 years in this industry I still don’t understand the difference.
Being a PM type role, I feel constantly pressured to show I am not one of the worthless ones. People go in assuming you are an asshole useless empty suit and it takes so much work to build a reputation you are not every time you move groups or teams.
/SMH
I hate loving what I do, but knowing I am surrounded by people failing to serve the people we say we exist to serve.
A good PM can make or break an entire dev team. I’ll let you know if I ever meet one. Good luck with your hunt.
I should really get off my ass and start looking around myself, but I’m at that stage in my software dev career where I’m about ready to just go live off the grid in a fucking cabin in the woods
I am pro PM. Someone has to keep track of tickets and hound dependencies, lord knows the devs won’t do it because they’re currently allocated to 2 or 3 other projects too. I suppose an EM could do the job but it’s just better when there’s someone whose job it is to be organized, you know?
In my experience, I’ve been subjected to a combination of 1) me being the one to handle those things anyways, and 2) something else. I forget. Ill think of it in the morning.
Yeah, that’s a bad project manager. A good project manager does all that stuff so you can get more concrete work done.
Not saying the average project manager isn’t bad, though.
Used to work in accounts payable for a tech agency. Absolutely depressing the number of project managers making six figures who couldn’t figure out “click on this box to e-sign the document.”
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