They're only useless if they legitimately suck at their job or don't give a fuck.
A good project manager will go a long way to keeping things running smoothly.
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
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My only gripe is when they act like they are technical instead of administrative.
I don't have a project manager and shit can't get done because I don't have the authority to get other people to do their job but I'm still held accountable for its progress. My direct manager thinks I'm supposed to do it even though it's not in my job title. I'm thinking of finding another job.
Sounds like your manager is the project manager lmao
He doesn't even show up to the weekly project meetings and relies on updates from our 1:1's.
That's some advanced management, i wonder what his solitaire time record is.
A lot of places park people who can't cut it doing the actual work in the project in project management roles instead of moving them on. They think, ohh they have intimate knowledge of the project and the working parts they'll be great.
It happens a lot for regular management as well.
A properly trained, proficient project manager can get more done with less people, defuse situations before they happen and cool the jets of higher ups making unreasonable demands.
Of course, some places are just shitholes run by assholes to which none of this applies.
Fuckin' preach. I've worked with a single pm worth their salt, and they got driven out by the useless cunts that couldn't MANAGE to get from their desk to a toilet without a meeting.
In my career most of the actually competent PMs actually got poached so we're left with the scraps.
Mine is the incompetents blame the competents for THEIR fuckups, and the competent ones don't put up with that shit.
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A Project Manager is someone who thinks nine women can deliver a baby in one month.
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The current PM where I work:
- cannot figure out audio settings for teams
- cannot understand microphone feedback loops
- cannot ask you your status on a task without giving just enough time for you to think it's your turn to speak only to then start speaking again the moment you start explaining your status
- cannot understand that an explanation for the status of a task can apply to multiple similar tasks
- always second guesses decisions
Their only actual job as far as I can tell is to tell the suits what they want to hear in their fucked up little business language. But I haven't seen that, so maybe they're terrible at that as well.
It feels like they memorized and religiously practice the CIA's handbook for field sabotage.
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Man, gotta disagree here. There are deadweights under every job title. Had a pm that literally carried the team on her back, while simultaneously shielding us from bullshit from on high.
Yeah, my team actually has a mix of great, good, and replacement level PMs. The bad ones either get let go or moved elsewhere. It helps that we tend to draw them from the roles that would be on projects they'd manage and seem to compensate them well enough that we retain all the good ones.
If an org can't find good PMs, the org needs to create them and pay them enough that they stick in the role. It's not easy, but it's not rocket science.
Nail on the head there. So many PMs are either outside the industry entirely or pulled from completely unrelated projects and it's just a disaster.
I've definitely seen both extremes. It's insane the difference a good PM makes, but they're rare because of how much pressure they have to handle.
Acceptable ones aren't too rare, that is, ones that don't have negative productivity -- depending on the industry and company politics, in some places it's BS all the way down. Good ones are rare and stellar ones are unicorns as it's a dual mastery thing: You have to be good at both the technical aspects, as well as the people aspect, and neither of those two can be mere talent, it needs to be talent and education. Judging by Alice Cecile, being a systems ecologist is the right overall qualification.
Unfortunately, you're right about as much as the original meme is. At my current gig, I've worked with half a dozen PMs, and while the majority of them were (seemingly) sweet and nice people, at least half of them would struggle to pour piss out of a boot if you wrote instructions on the heel. Even with project templates and runbooks, we still regularly had to clean up after them because they didn't do part of the project or expected us to work on stuff that wasn't marked as being live yet.
There are definitely some amazing PMs, but I've met way more terrible PMs who don't know shit about fuck and don't care to learn than good PMs.
project managers (or any types of managers/admins) who are forces of nature can really drive things forward. this person talks about the useless kind of manager which often tries to interject him/her self in everything slowing things down. They act like this mostly because otherwise they would be useless as that is their only skill and they got the position through mix of luck and network.
Look ain't saying I agree with it
But they're right up there with Scrum Masters. Guides whatever
venture capitalist
that's not useless, that's actively harmful
A good PM will herd all the cats and attend all the meetings you don't want to. They're worth their weight in gold.
A bad PM will do none of the above and constantly drag you in to fight their fires. They're worth their weight in, well, you know.
Note I've seen the "protecting me from a meeting" backfire so hard.
One time for lack of headcount I did a bit of double duty as project manager including executive meetings. Then management found a project manager and instead of knocking out my part of those meetings in like 5 minutes, I suddenly had generally hour long prep meetings so my new project manager would be confident enough to engage in whatever random topic the execs tended to go into. After a quarter they demanded I swap back in to do the meetings instead, which I was happy to do.
Also, those meetings are my best chance to cut through some confusion so I don't end up with a mess of crap in the tracker.
As a PM who tries to not waste anyone's time, thank you. I've had pushback before from people who don't like to do the talking, but I would only call that person forward if it's going to prevent a ton of headaches all around. Sometimes it's difficult to explain that. Otherwise I have no problem being the punching bag on stage. It's my job.