Good managers are able to allocate resources–particularly human resources–to complete a task. I know that it’s a common trope to think that managers only take value instead of adding it, but it’s simply not true; processes and production are less efficient without effective management.

People working in production shouldn’t have to deal with clients/customers, nor should they be expected to coordinate with vendors, or even all other people involved in production. Production people are hired for their skill/expertise in production, so they should be left to do their job rather than taking on more jobs.

The flip side is that ineffective management can make processes and production less efficient than they would be without any management at all.

As a software guy, I love this. People building and running software products don’t need project managers. We ned product owners/managers. It’s a product, it has users, it doesn’t have an end date.

This fairy tale still lives? Sheesh, some people really are dense. Like, neutron star kind of dense

I fucking hate comments defending PMs like “you hate PMs if you only worked with bad ones”

Fuck no, they’re the idea guys of tech, they’re useless. Their entire existence depends on engineers not giving enough fucks about the product. They’re the result or a broken team structure. They’re annoying and have no real skills, which is proven by their excitement about AI nowadays. Every PM I’ve came across is hyping up AI, most of them vibe coding, whatever the fuck that means.

People who think managers are useless have either likely only worked for good ones or bad ones. Good ones make it look so easy it looks like they do nothing.

Quite often when I’m managing the work floor if we have a good week I have almost nothing to do on fridays. Sometimes the staff make comments about it and I always say the same thing “If I’m scrambling on Friday, it means I fucked up on Wednesday and we’re all going to have a shitty Monday.”