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Comment by arbitrage | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps the adventurer is asking themselves, "Hey, doesn't the task giver KNOW the guy who has the key? And they're really good friends? And they know exactly what they need? And where to get it? And what to do with it? So why are they asking ME to do it for them?"

Perhaps they resent a poorly communicated request. Perhaps the task giver does this literally ALL THE TIME ... getting other people to do their work. Maybe the adventurer wants you to fail, because you do this all the time, and like, maybe for once you should do it yourself.

There's lots of reasons things don't get done in projects. Mind-reading and coming up with explanations about why someone is failing in the project is a shitty replacement for communicating needs and wants clearly in an organized fashion.

That is, when a project has a project manager, the project fails because of the project manager.

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> That is, when a project has a project manager, the project fails because of the project manager.

That is also 100% true when a project does not have a project manager.

Reminds me of the old gag-with-a-painful-truth: "A meeting without an agenda accomplishes precisely everything on the agenda".

This is true. My comment is going to seem self serving because I am a project manager, but You Need A Project Manager! Someone who will ensure that things that need communicating get communicated. Someone who can see across the whole project and even multiple projects and communicate priorities clearly. Someone who will chase down deliverables and ensure everyone is unblocked. Very rarely will developers proactively reach out and admit they are blocked and can’t complete task A because team B needs to deliver task C first. They’ll just silently move over to the next Jira ticket. You need a project manager to pry it out of them! You need a project manager who can indeed read minds. Why is X not getting done? Why is Y ignoring her EMail? Why haven’t we heard from team Z for a week? Risk + inaction = crisis. Good project managers smell risk in the air before it turns into crisis, and take action.

Agreed.

And while not every project requires or deserves a dedicated PM - every project needs someone who'l own the PM responsibilities. It can be _very_ hard as one of the devs on a very small project with no PM to "smell the risk in the air" while you're deep down the rabbit hole of coding - but if nobody does it things are very likely to eventually grind to a time wasting halt.

Great Project Managers are worth their weight in single malt scotch. (or substitute your personal very expensive substance...)

This brought back flashbacks of people asking me to do things that required knowledge that only the requester had, using credentials that only the requester had, with support from people that the requester knows that I did not, and so on. I cannot personally fathom what brings people to do this since it seems to me like it is more work to give these sorts of tasks than to do them.

But the job of the manager is by definition to assign tasks. A bad manager doesn't delegate and tries to do everything herself. Not doing a task you agreed to as some sort of petty revenge or to teach a lesson is incredibly unprofessional. Just don't accept the task to begin with.

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