Comment by hn_throwaway_99

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 14 hours ago

But in reality that's just a natural career progression for like 90% of people as they move up the ladder.

There are actually very few people above around age 45 or so that write code for a majority of their day (percentage-wise), and that includes people who still consider themselves in "individual contributor" roles. E.g. even a principal engineer is going to be spending a majority of their time reviewing code, doing systems and architecture work, mentoring more junior developers, organizing more junior developers, etc. When I was a principal engineer a huge part of my job was "project management" as you put it.

austin-cheney 12 hours ago

> "project management" as you put it

That is like saying “doctor” as you put it. It’s super cliche for people in software to title themselves as principal or expert or famed ninja grand wizard and yet simultaneously not know how the real world works. Project management is actually a real thing, seriously. It’s not just some imaginary invocation like lawyer or teacher. People actually do that for a job and get paid real money. Unlike software where developers pretend to be qualified against their own imagined baseline there is actually a license/cert from a universally recognized governance body.

This kind of nonsense is why so many developers that don’t have imposter syndrome want out.

If you want to see what real project managers do then peer into construction where they manage billions of dollars in assets with critical timelines that have multimillion liabilities.

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hn_throwaway_99 8 hours ago

I think you took offense because you interpreted my "project management" statement to be in scare quotes, where that was certainly not my intention - I literally just put them in quotes to highlight that I was quoting from your previous comment.
I certainly didn't mean to denigrate the job of project management. But I do agree with the other response - project management is just about ensuring a job is done on time/budget by tracking and managing a complex set of dependencies. I will say, at least in my experience, that really great official software project managers (I mean that was their job title) are worth their weight in gold, but they happen to be quite rare (again, emphasis on "in my experience"). Too often I worked with project managers whose thought their role was scheduling meetings and constantly asking all the engineers if the Jira board was up to date. But I think this because, when done correctly, the project management role is a challenging one that takes an unusual combination of attention to detail, communication skills, and ability to stay motivated on what can feel like boring tasks in the moment.

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scarface_74 8 hours ago

There are also “certifications” for AWS. I have six of them. They prove nothing as far as competence in an of themselves.
In the grand scheme of things, project management is about making sure projects are done on time, on budget and meets requirements.
It’s about managing dependencies, from a software development methodology, it’s creating a directed acyclic graph but with people instead of computers.
It’s also dealing with managing stakeholders, contributors, blockers, budgets, scheduling meetings, keeping the higher up informed, etc.
If you put a gun to my head, I can be a competent project manager. As a “staff” software architect half of my job managing cloud projects as a tech lead with the other half being more of a solution architect when we first sign a customer and designing an implementation plan with work streams and epics.
Usually I end up splitting the project management part up with a real project manager.
It’s not because of a lack of competence. It’s bandwidth.
But just like you can’t be a good tech lead if you don’t have some level of competence technically, you have to be decent at project management.

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