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Software development topics I've changed my mind on

(chriskiehl.com)
873 points belter | 1 comments | 05 Feb 25 09:50 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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zafka ◴[05 Feb 25 15:42 UTC] No.42950100[source]▶
"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.

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1. mystickphoenix ◴[05 Feb 25 16:24 UTC] No.42950819[source]▶
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.