Software development topics I've changed my mind on

"93%, maybe 95.2%, of project managers, could disappear tomorrow to either no effect or a net gain in efficiency. (this estimate is up from 4 years ago)"

This made me laugh it is so true. My last big project at "Big Co" ( Knee surgery robot ) My small group went through 4 project managers - just for our small team. The entire project had probably 20. While a few where enjoyable to work with, there was very little value added and a lot of time spent filling them in.

Agree - in my 10+ year career, I've run into exactly 2 PM's that have provided enough value to a team or project to justify their inclusion in the team or project. Both were technical enough to understand what the engineers were working on and talking about and were able to offer genuinely good suggestions.

The rest? At best they were glorified QA/QC with a large stick to hit the engineers with when the spec wasn't met exactly. And when it was, and things still failed, they still hit the engineers with the large stick and were usually promoted for it.

You can extend this to all varieties of PM. Product/Project/Program. All should be replaced by people who actually create things. E.g. I prefer to have a UX Designer handle the Product Manager tasks, since they already think about the app from the user's perspective, and can actually create solutions to problems.

When org charts are from 2 reorgs ago, team members are going straight to members of other teams where collaboration is needed, the backlog is 100% maintained by the developers with no input from managers, I wonder what exactly they do outside of meetings where they usually just relay orders from higher up.

At $PREVIOUS_JOB, the team I was on worked the best when we had no manager. Or rather, we had a director (who should not have been managing us directly) meet with us once a week to tell us "here's what we're headed ... good?" and let us go work in quiet until the next meeting (or meet with us sooner if something really important cropped up).

I was really surprised to hear this because I feel the exact opposite! I've worked mainly with project managers who ran all the ceremonies, held people accountable, dealt with planning and doling out tasks, handled stakeholders and generally protected the devs from distractions, and took real leadership and accountability in the project.

Whenever I've worked on a team where a developer is the team lead and has to do all that stuff on top of coding- or worse, it's just a free for all with no leader- , things in my experience go much worse, communication breaks down, and things slip through the cracks.