> You can't lead developers if you have no clue about developing. Sorry.<p>I’ve been both a developer and a development manager (and a few other things), and once upon a time I would have agreed wholeheartedly with this.<p>Then about 10 years ago I started working with the best PM I have ever known. He is absolutely not technical.<p>He is, however, a great listener, opionated about protecting people from burnout and dumb processes, honest to a fault, and able to speak candidly and openly to techs, devs, execs, and everything in between, switching language as he goes.<p>On one project we worked on, I had an advisory role and he ran the development sprints. He was amazing at understanding what the devs needed and managing the manager’s unrealistic expectations of how quickly things could be done.<p>He also put his foot down and insisted that everything flow through him, to be integrated into schedules based on, well, balancing everything else with business priorities.<p>It took a some time for the devs to trust him, and it took a lot of soft skill work on his part to gain that trust, but before long they realized their weeks were pretty evenly balanced.<p>The first big win was no more high priority interrupts from the manager, who had to work through him. That helped a lot.<p>He knows nothing about development, in the sense of having no idea how to do it.<p>He does know people and knows how understand what they need.<p>FWIW, YMMV. He’s a rare breed.
"Senior developer " is the worst role you can have. You are the architect, manager of your devs, heat shield, meetings attender, and you still full time coding job. You get 2% annual raises for your trouble because you are salary capped.<p>I jumped ship to a tech lead job. Now I do what I always wanted which is to direct a team (dotted line) by scaffolding out the project using diagrams and shallow coding. Very few soul sucking status meetings. .Dream job and a nice 25% salary boost.
I think a project manager trying to run agile is almost a contradiction in terms.<p>Agile is usually a team practise which outsiders like a PM don't get a say in. The Product Owner feeds work in and stakeholders get to argue about the order of each item and that's all.<p>A retrospective allows the team to adjust their way of working to fit better to their situation and it is them that decide not some PM.<p>Standups are aimed at killing long status meetings and if they're not then something is wrong. The Ceremonies have a purpose and the overall purpose is to use the development resource that is available to do the things that most need to be done and not waste it on anything else.<p>To bring this back to the article - how can a project manager decide what is or isn't efficient for some team? How can they estimate anything when they are far from the details - no matter how much programming they did in the past?
This resonated with me in so many ways. I frequently use the “garden” analogy and I think developing software efficiently in small teams is absolutely crucial. Society wastes so much time, effort and goodwill on unqualified software project (mis)management.<p>I have lost two important (to me) jobs because I refused to adopt stupid, inefficient processes handed down by non-technical “managers” who thought they knew how to manage developers better than I did, despite my 30 years of experience.<p>Reading this almost made me cry. If I could upvote this a thousand times then I would.
Seems to be the same story over and over. I am also a senior dev who was was taken in as tech lead which on day one turned in to scrum master but told to keep it light and develop at the same time. Then the team grew and the role became team lead, responsible for organising and team, time lines, deliverabes and recruitment, but I am not a project manager, we don't hire project managers, still need to code as well (fat chance). You get to hate it and start to envy the junior and mid level Devs.
Are there any resources on how to move from developer to product X role?<p>I've realized I'm more interesting in creating solutions and ways to make them better than coding them, but the path to get from A to B seems muddied.
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.
A quick informal poll for devs stuck with agile out there:<p>After scrum, do you:<p>1. Immediately get to work<p>2. Spend time going through recent communications<p>3. Walk away from the keyboard to decompress<p>?
> You can't lead developers if you have no clue about developing. Sorry.<p>Yessss. So many companies dont understand that. Every time I was a part of project that struggled it was due to terrible middle managers that did not understand anything and could not decide.<p>They often try to dispatch ALL their work to someone beside status meetings and forwarding emails.<p>Useless leeches. If you are this kind of Project Manager do everyone a favor and leave.<p>Team will most likely not even notice you are not there.