Accurate programming movie

Good project managers are invaluable. I'd much rather explain status to a sympathetic ear and have them reword it for diplomacy than try and directly advocate with executives - and I celebrate any customer communications I don't have to be a party to.

When PMs act like part of the dev team and handle the communication side of the project it lets devs focus on the important shit... and if your PM is asking for daily updates then they're too green (or you're too unreliable) to have built up a good level of trust. Nobody fucking cares if a project is delivered at 3PM or 4PM, so who the fuck cares about daily or hourly project updates - the status won't be materially different.

It's like managers or fellow developers - good ones are invaluable and shitty ones make everyone's lives harder... the difference is that PM seems to be a position that attracts do-nothing folks so it's more likely you'll get a shitty roll.

They're technically there to ensure the project has the correct resources aligned, and manage the project budget.

Aka if they want timely updates, they can purchase & fetch me coffee! I don't need them, but they sure as hell need me.

A big project with lots of people and moving parts that doesn't need each individual tracking their own status and needs because the Project Manager is keeping everything up to date and keeping the Senior Managers off your back is invaluable.

Go Live was buttery smooth. We were all in and out by lunch, even after having to address a hang up on the fly.

Good project managers are worth their weight in gold

I don't work in software, I'm a chemical (aka process) engineer.

Some project managers are superfluous if they don't have a background being an engineer of some discipline themselves, but the vast majority I've worked with are excellent because they have a working knowledge of everything required to progress each stage of the project, and deal with most of the client interactions.

Being able to say: "we've done x, but we still need y, z and aa to progress" and then the project manager organising this getting done together with the other discipline leads is a godsend, letting you focus on doing the actual calculations/design/nitty-gritty details. And the fact they manage the annoying role of dealing with clients and the disagreements around that is also great.

This is working as a consultant, but I imagine if you replace clients with higher ups, I'd imagine the same still applies.

Perhaps things are very different in software, but I do think there is some use for them.

But I've never had one check up every 15 mins, more like once a day, and only if something is very time sensitive. Otherwise it's once a week, or by email as required.

I've had, hands down, one of the worst project managers in the world. Hewas overly concerned with team politics and toxicly positive. His toxic positivity was the main reason in my opinion as to why we never delivered anything usable to the company and were eventually downsized. He had no vision at all for quick and frequent delivery... he was the wrong person for the job but consistently believed that he just needed to "do his best for the day" and sleep happy that night. Meanwhile, his team was boiling with frustration and wasted work hours for features requested by management on a whim — these usually end up fully forgotten by the time they are production ready. His biggest accomplishment is somewhat shielding his team from upper management... sometimes. He was such a bottle neck and our team was a net loss to the company except where they could advertise "using AI" in their products. If he had been removed, and we (his team) had to manage things ourselves with the stakeholders, we would have probably been able to deliver something worthwhile every quarter or so.

They're supposed to work as an adaptor/buffer/filter between the technical side and the non-technical stakeholders (customers, middle/upper management) and doing some level of organising.

In my 2 and a half decades of experience (a lot of it as a freelancer, so I worked in a lot of companies of all sizes in a couple of countries), most aren't at all good at it, and very few are very good at it.

Some are so bad that they actually amplify uncertainty and disorganisation by, every time they talk to a customer or higher up, totally changing the team's direction and priorities.

Mind you, all positions have good professionals and bad professionals, the problem with project management is that a bad professional can screw a lot of work of a lot of people, whilst the damage done by, for example, a single bad programmer, tends to be much more contained and generally mainly impacts the programer him or herself (so that person is very much incentivised to improve).

I’m still not sure what a project manager contributes.

I've well over a decade in software project management. The number one thing we contribute to a project is saying to the client (internal or external) "Sure, we can add that feature but it will have an impact on the delivery timeline unless we deprioritise other features. Are you happy for us to extend the deadline? If not, let's talk about what we can cut from the existing scope in favour of your new feature."

They are there for higher ups to bitch at in toxic orgs. Thats why they pester constantly; noone wanta to be bitched at.

At my job, me and another guy were given stuff to work on. But unknown to product, there's a lot of shared code there.

In my imagination, it should be someone's job to coordinate this. Instead, I finished a chunk of mine, he finished a chunk of his, and then there was confusion. Maybe that's just a technical team lead's job.

While Hugh Jackman gets some sloppy dome (with a gun pointed to his head).

Its because he's the best there is folks.

WHICH IS WHY WE SHOULD DEREGULATE EVERYTHING! INCLUDING FOOD AND DRINKING WATER, AND WE SHOULD ALLOW ALLOW COMAPNIES TO DUMP INTO RIVERS!

I love hollywood

It's my favorite Godzilla movie because of this aspect. There's a scene where I lost it in the theater when the >!Prime Minister is completely certain in telling the press that Godzilla will absolutely never, not in a million years, not make landfall.. only to have an underling whisper in his ear that Godzilla just made landfall.!<

I worked for a Japanese company at the time, and could recognize that it wasn't even heightened for parody. That's just exactly how it is.

WHY DID THIS 3 POINTER TAKE FIVE DAYS

YES YES, IT'S NOT TIME BUT WE ARE TRACKING IT THAT WAY BUT IT'S IMPORTANT FOR YOU TO NOT THINK OF IT THAT WAY WHEN YOU ESTIMATE BUT WHY DID YOU GO OVER THREE DAYS

Can we push back the deadline for the apocalypse? Have we talked to the customer to see if this is a possibility?

On second thoughr.... Is this a world we wanna save?

Then again, the guy giving you that remark usually doesn't know the difference

If you hate the taste of scrum give SAFe a try! (but really, please don't)

I mean, Agile doesn't really demand that you do or don't use tickets. You can definitely use tickets without scrum.

The last one hurt a bit.

Why won't you sprint the sprint so we can get more sprints in the sprint?

And silicon valley

I get the message here for sure, but imo tickets (while important) take a back seat to a rich commit history. Ifbthe commit messages and history are high quality enough, one can tell whats up with the code sinply by looking at the log.

Tickets on the otherhand are in a secondary system. Of course, they can bind the work of multiple projects together. But honestly, has anyone ever been able to just reach the ticket history and know everything about a project without asking someone?

There's an alternative to creating too many tickets that only add overhead and then make it harder to get into the project. Creating a good amount of tickets.

I took the OP reference as demand for ticket creation when they don't make sense and only hinder development through unnecessary overhead. E.g. creating a ticket before a quick analysis, or creating individual tickets when one story/feature ticket would be enough. Or more specifically in this case, having to create one before fixing a critical blocker.

https://xkcd.com/208/

We're making the world a better place 🙏

If anybody here ever does make such an app: Please, please release it anonymously, because the people you're saving it from will be angry.

EoD? End of December? End of Death? (reference to world going to end)

I am currently doing this right now, pharma code team gave me a whole program and now i need to find out how everything works...

It's definitely satire, but I feel Silicon Valley did a decent job. Yes they absolutely made things up, but it was more about the backend and pushing updates and servers being erased because someone accidentally sat a drink on a keyboard.

It's practically a documentary

https://youtu.be/M1D2zTJhIss

That's the one for me, from Spider-Man no way home. Keep adding more stuff to a complex working until reality itself breaks.