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.
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.
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 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)