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Mecca-Benghazi posted:There is a project management thread already, not development specific but might be interesting all the same: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3853180&perpage=40 Product management and project management are two separate disciplines, even if they do have some overlap and both get abbreviated "PM" a lot. A product manager is supposed to figure out strategic priorities to make whatever it is you're actually building better. That means they work with business, UX, or market research folks to understand what the product needs to do, work with the tech team to understand what's feasible to build, and settle the inevitable slapfights between those groups. A good product manager understands project management because they need to participate in setting roadmaps and high-level schedules, but they're probably not going to get into the weeds of sprint velocity and technical dependency management. A project manager's fundamental job is to answer the questions, "when do we get it, and how much will it cost," with a detailed, workable plan, and then make sure that plan is executed. They go wrangle dependencies, set intermediate deadlines, make sure other teams are delivering on schedule, and re-plan the whole thing when it turns out things went horribly wrong (because all plans are wrong, but good plans remain useful despite that). A good project manager will have some insight into the product, because they want to deliver the right thing on time rather than just delivering something on time, but they're not going to get into the weeds of requirements gathering and horse-trading tradeoffs. Any major project that's not strictly defined from the outset needs both roles. Expecting one person to handle everything in both spaces on a complex project is a very common path to heartbreak.
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Sep 14, 2020 00:39
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Hear hear!
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Sep 14, 2020 00:48
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if I'm a software engineer who wants to get into this product management stuff, what should I do?
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Sep 14, 2020 01:29
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Talk to the product managers at your current company and see what opportunities are right there.
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Sep 14, 2020 02:00
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If you face such unfortunate personnel constraints that you can only have either a product manager or a project manager but not both, you should prefer to have a product manager. A good way for someone to make progress toward being a product manager is to work alongside a product manager and help with their workload.
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Sep 14, 2020 02:11
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ketchup vs catsup posted:if I'm a software engineer who wants to get into this product management stuff, what should I do? Reevaluate your life decisions. More seriously, think about how you would feel if your day were actually Just Meetings Then More Meetings (and then doing your actual work at home after hours), you got a huge pay cut, and didn't really get the appreciation of anyone. Good PMs are phenomenal assets and worth their weight in gold, but we sure don't pay them that way.
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Sep 14, 2020 03:28
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Bongo Bill posted:If you face such unfortunate personnel constraints that you can only have either a product manager or a project manager but not both, you should prefer to have a product manager. Having a project manager means you're doing project based work instead of continuous improvements to some system, and project-based work is hell. If your company has project managers, run.
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Sep 14, 2020 07:03
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I"ve never seen a project manager bring actual value to a team.
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Sep 14, 2020 07:07
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Carbon dioxide posted:Having a project manager means you're doing project based work instead of continuous improvements to some system, and project-based work is hell. If your company has project managers, run. Oh? Doing waterfall project work was the most fun I ever had as a developer. I had a real deadline, a real set of requirements, a big chart that showed it all, and the team was left alone to do it apart from the PM checking in. The continuous grind of little sprints and chores and stand-ups and making tickets and priorities changing from sprint to sprint and never, ever being DONE is what seems like hell to me.
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Sep 14, 2020 08:10
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You guys are awesome. This was all extremely helpful. I'm glad to hear that domain expertise is essential because I was brought on as a domain expert. My prior experience is largely in academia and this will be my first role in a startup, which is why I am particularly concerned with the more managerial aspects of my new position. I have a great relationship with the CEO so I am less worried about handling the other stakeholders. He will be my primary contact point outside my team (other than the users themselves) as this is a small startup that just finished its seed round. Sounds like being organized, having clear consistent prioritization, conveying my domain expertise and product vision via clear and detailed user/job stories, along with facilitating dev work by removing blockers whenever possible are the key things I need to make sure I am doing from the dev perspective.
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Sep 14, 2020 08:50
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Project managers don't bring that much value to individual teams. Where they can really shine is in coordinating across multiple teams in large projects. Not all do, but having been in organizations with good project management and without, I definitely want to work with the good ones.
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Sep 14, 2020 13:26
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Xguard86 posted:I'm happy to chat here if others don't mind or via PM (pun!). Please feel free to chat here, this is by no means a dev exclusive clubhouse and it's nice to hear from other perspectives from time to time this applies to anyone else who may be lurking because they're not a code monkey - qa, project management, design, whatever
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Sep 14, 2020 16:34
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Carbon dioxide posted:Having a project manager means you're doing project based work instead of continuous improvements to some system, and project-based work is hell. If your company has project managers, run. How do you define "project based work" here? You can model almost any work that's not purely "keep the lights on and deal with problems as they come up" as a project. Bongo Bill posted:If you face such unfortunate personnel constraints that you can only have either a product manager or a project manager but not both, you should prefer to have a product manager. This really depends on the work. If it's well defined up front and needs to stick to a strict schedule, then you're going to need project management over product management. If you're going to be in "figure it out as we go" mode and aren't held to a strict deadline, then project management isn't as important but you need a strong product manager to help define what the "it" is you're figuring out.
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Sep 14, 2020 18:33
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Things that are cool: parameterized tests, when the parameters are just testing some basic conditions for a couple similar scenarios Things that are less cool: parameterized tests, when the parameters are goddamn massive complex beasts that each individually run more lines than the test itself This is a 300 test wherein the parameters occupy lines NINE THROUGH TWO HUNDRED NINETY FOUR 
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Sep 14, 2020 19:26
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ChickenWing posted:Please feel free to chat here, this is by no means a dev exclusive clubhouse and it's nice to hear from other perspectives from time to time Well in that case. Boy if you think finding good dev jobs is hard, come on over to product land. TBH I don't even think of myself as very good but I at least am aware of what I should aspire to. Which is better than 90% of the other product people I've run into. I don't blame any dev for seeing POs and PMs as useless, because so many of them are terrible or so hamstrung by their role that they might as well be terrible. I've almost left product 2 distinct times but I like the pay and enjoy the job "as it should be" so I'm probably a lifer now.
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Sep 14, 2020 19:46
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Xguard86 posted:Boy if you think finding good dev jobs is hard, come on over to product land. as someone who had PM duties added to my workload for a couple months: gently caress no
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Sep 14, 2020 20:23
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Uh one more PM thing. If our team catches a bug please do not (as a non technical PM) use this as an opportunity to start reviewing code in order to double check that we fundamentally implemented your story correctly, and understand how to smooth over an edge case. We are on the same page about the desired behavior - you are not responsible for code correctness. It is not necessary/helpful, and will not result in you gaining any extra confidence as we try to explain and fail since you have not (and do not need to, really!) trained your brain to think like this. Having a very cool day in which I made very little progress with actually fixing the thing.
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Sep 15, 2020 01:19
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haha, what?
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Sep 15, 2020 06:41
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I agree with everything that’s been said but will add that sometimes the bullshit the dev team needs shielding from comes from the dev team itself. Your devs will need to be told “no” sometimes and that’s ok. A really difficult but high-leverage skill is knowing when and how to do it in a way that keeps them trusting you instead of resenting you. (A huge part of the “how” is having built trust in the first place - if they already think of you as someone who makes their lives easier, they’ll be much more willing to buy that that’s what you’re doing when you tell them “no.”)
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Sep 15, 2020 07:02
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Xarn posted:haha, what? Yeah... when someone says “can I look at code” I will point them to a web view of the thing they’re talking about since I don’t have any cover to say “no not possible” but man do I have my feelings about the wisdom of a product manager asking to do this. My team has been doing a real slow bungle job on a quagmire of a project so I’m not totally unsympathetic to product losing some trust but let’s stay in our lanes a bit. If it’s really this bad product should be asking for our heads to roll or trying to switch to a different team, demanding to understand bugs and fixes at the level of looking at code is unproductive and a weird flex.
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Sep 15, 2020 13:55
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YanniRotten posted:Yeah... when someone says “can I look at code” I will point them to a web view of the thing they’re talking about since I don’t have any cover to say “no not possible” but man do I have my feelings about the wisdom of a product manager asking to do this. Yeah uh that's pretty profoundly offside. Discussing the solution, sure, if I'd been loving up recently I'd expect some amount of review on "is this performing to requirements?". But someone with no dev experience looking over my shoulder to make sure I'm writing if statements correctly is a profound enough level of distrust that I'd be escalating, and if it had management buy-in I'd be looking for a new team/job.
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Sep 15, 2020 14:15
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ChickenWing posted:But someone with no dev experience looking over my shoulder to make sure I'm writing if statements correctly is a profound enough level of distrust that I'd be escalating, and if it had management buy-in I'd be looking for a new team/job. At my last job that person was the CEO of the company 
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Sep 15, 2020 14:41
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Lol I'm tech literate enough to scrape together dumb python scripts and I'd never even think to ask for a code review. Holy poo pooXguard86 posted:I don't blame any dev for seeing POs and PMs as useless, because so many of them are terrible
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Sep 15, 2020 15:16
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Can you have this special case added to our standard behavior today? Should just be an if/then thing
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Sep 15, 2020 16:13
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One of our C-levels used to be a coder (...20 years ago...) and will offer coding advice sometimes. One of my coworkers has a fantastic strategy for dealing with it, which is explaining exactly why the solution that worked in 1999 will no longer work, which usually takes quite a while when he checks to make sure he has understanding at every step. The end result is that our C-level has stopped offering so many code solutions.
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Sep 15, 2020 17:30
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Thats inspiring. If I ever become a C-level, 100% of my coding advise will be based on 90s-era Perl. “Have you tried adding more regular expressions?” “Pipe the output to this Bash script, it’ll mostly work.” “What the gently caress is scope?”
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Sep 15, 2020 17:55
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rt4 posted:Can you have this special case added to our standard behavior today? Should just be an if/then thing We can just reuse (something completely different, non reusable, exists inside a different app in a different language, not exposed by API or library)
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Sep 15, 2020 17:57
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CEO of my last company telling me how to improve the video analysis algorithm I was working on: "You should look at how the pixels change over time." CEO of the company before that demanding to know why my team wasn't working faster in a new framework: "It's just like laying bricks. They should be able to lay bricks faster than this." Thank god the CEO at my current much larger company doesn't know me from Adam. I've had good PMs (both product and project) and I've had bad, and I'd rather have a dozen bad PMs than one out-of-touch C-suite cornering me in my office and giving me inane loving advice during critical situations.
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Sep 15, 2020 18:10
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YanniRotten posted:We can just reuse (something completely different, non reusable, exists inside a different app in a different language, not exposed by API or library) I had a VIP tell me we needed to completely rework my project's core data model with two weeks until release to make it compatible with a tiny library. Related, we just launched a new product after an 8 week whiteboard-to-production dev cycle 
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Sep 15, 2020 18:33
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Pedestrian Xing posted:I had a VIP tell me we needed to completely rework my project's core data model with two weeks until release to make it compatible with a tiny library. This is exactly where a good project manager is worth their weight in gold. "Sure, you can have what you want. It's going to take two additional weeks, and cost $80,000 extra, versus a planned three days and $15k to reimplement the subset of library functionality we need against our current data model. If we go forward with the refactor do we want to cut other features, or eat the time and cost hits?" is a great way to shut down pointless tweaks.
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Sep 15, 2020 18:42
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vonnegutt posted:One of our C-levels used to be a coder (...20 years ago...) on deploying a huge infrastructure to do video and audio fingerprinting on a global scale: "can't we just port it to app engine? I wrote an Amazon price calculator that has hundreds of hits a week and that runs just fine on it so idk why it should be so complicated"
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Sep 15, 2020 20:48
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YanniRotten posted:Yeah... when someone says “can I look at code” I will point them to a web view of the thing they’re talking about since I don’t have any cover to say “no not possible” but man do I have my feelings about the wisdom of a product manager asking to do this. I had a person (executive level of course) state they wanted to "see the data". They meant the stuff in the DB. This is and always will be a giant red flag. Ya sure, here's some creds. Go hog wild. downout fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Sep 15, 2020 |
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Sep 15, 2020 22:44
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A friend got this from a recruiter:quote:I get that this position is a step down from your current job, but you are exactly what they are looking for, so it's a perfect fit in that sense.
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Sep 16, 2020 01:05
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ultrafilter posted:A friend got this from a recruiter: I still kick myself for not taking this "step down" from a senior position to a mid-level data engineer position with a pay cut for something SUPER interesting, related to my dissertation topic (which was a surprise) with good work-life balance. I imagine any recruiter reaching out for that won't be THAT situation, at least. Ghost of Reagan Past fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Sep 16, 2020 |
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Sep 16, 2020 01:19
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ultrafilter posted:A friend got this from a recruiter: Not one that'd convince me to leave a better job for an otherwise worse one, mind you, but still.
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Sep 16, 2020 08:07
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ultrafilter posted:A friend got this from a recruiter: Honestly if I’d gotten a message like that from a recruiter while at my previous job, I would have been all over it. My previous job got to the point where it was so bad I would have taken a lower level job with worse pay (even though I was already severely underpaid) just to escape and still be in a position where I got to use my skills and experience. Then again, by the time I turned in my two weeks notice, I wasn’t that far off from ragequitting to go flip burgers at Wendy’s and/or start taking up furry porn commissions.
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Sep 16, 2020 13:29
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It also doesn’t help that seniority varies from company to company and someone’s “senior” dev could be someone else’s “junior.”
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Sep 16, 2020 14:26
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Protocol7 posted:It also doesn’t help that seniority varies from company to company and someone’s “senior” dev could be someone else’s “junior.” I made a lateral (compensation-wise) move from Senior to SE2 and maybe it’s just me but it feels a lot different. It feels way less egalitarian when a team has a single “lead”, a couple of SE2s and a few SE1s, than when there’s a lead but also a couple of seniors in with the mix of junior titles. YMMV but Senior felt like more of a decision making role where the team cared about your input and ideas and SE2 is a “not lead” role grinding out whatever they told you to do.
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Sep 16, 2020 14:53
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Space Gopher posted:This is exactly where a good project manager is worth their weight in gold. This falls down if the requester is a big enough deal and doesn't want to hear it. The owner several jobs ago would tell the product team "well since we're going to be late already just add <unwritten, new feature> to the release too" If they're not, this really is an area where a pm can shine.
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Sep 16, 2020 16:44
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YanniRotten posted:I made a lateral (compensation-wise) move from Senior to SE2 and maybe it’s just me but it feels a lot different. It feels way less egalitarian when a team has a single “lead”, a couple of SE2s and a few SE1s, than when there’s a lead but also a couple of seniors in with the mix of junior titles. I'm probably a dumbass, but what does SE2 and SE1 stand for?
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Sep 16, 2020 16:48
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