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Comment by Hominem | Hacker News Reader

My PM is on vacation this week and I've had to partially fill in. I have been getting frantic urgent emails from roughly 7 am till 1 am. If this is what the guy puts up with, he deserves a couple bucks.

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I crossed over from Project Management into Engineering, and my experience was that as a PM my job was to be bothered from Sunup til Sundown and periodically in between. I was expected to know everything about anything that I was asked about, and I was responsible for a large number of people's output without having any authority over them.

It was horrible.

I think the issue with the SO question is simply the view that what PMs and BAs do isn't 'real' work. They might not write code, but sometimes they're the only ones making it so the engineers can.

What you describe is a dysfunctional organization, not a justification for PMs.

I think that is the right answer - a dysfunctional organisation is the justification for PMs and BAs

if the film crew \ theory x idea is right then an org aisation that is becoming dysfunctional hires more PMs

I suspect that they are symptom initially and then cause.

I disagree. A PM is an excellent communicator between engineers and the rest of the organization. It's not a matter of dysfunction, but a way of filtering what is important and what isn't.

I've been in both situations where a) I am in direct contact with the rest of the organization and b) where an intermediary is. I prefer B and that is what a PM is for.

Some large organizations may be able to eliminate the middle man, but I wager they've dug a ditch so deep they can't tell the difference.

My large organization has the managers of engineers, who are engineers themselves, act as the intermediary.

I've met very few PMs who know enough to filter anything.

Or a large, international organization with employees and clients all around the world, each of whom believe that their problem is the most important thing in the world.

I've worked for some of the largest corporations in the world, 3 of them in the fortune 100 one of which is a fortune 20 company.

I've seen it done well and done poorly at that scale. What the person I replied to was describing is a dysfunctional organization, not a functional large organization. Creating a large functional organization is just like creating good abstractions in software. You have to figure out how to structure things so that teams/business units can work together with minimal communication across teams.

At a job some years ago I got SMS messages from system monitoring almost continuously, around the clock. Most were spurious "this is an indicator that something might possibly go wrong" status messages, and I worked hard to smarten up the monitoring. Once I was only getting messages when something actually was going wrong, I worked hard to make the system more reliable so that I could get a good night's sleep. The more I continued down that path, the more time I had to make the system even more reliable and also add needed features.

This sort of approach is not limited to coding at all. It does require that you have some control over the issues that take up your time and energy. If your PM were to quit and you were to take up that position, I'd advise you to take an in-depth look at removing the problems that lead to frantic, urgent requests.

Most of them were due to an outage we had on a "legacy application" due to some sort of screwups with the VMs it was running on. This caused reps to hammer me with questions about our SLAs. Of course I had no answer.

Many more emails were from offshore devs from a project I'm not normally involved with who didn't understand our specs.

There were also a smattering of issues with reps getting calls that our app was down. Ask a few questions and it turns out the person is using it on a train in a tunnel in the middle of iowa type of situation. It's a web app.

Sounds like that's mostly outside the PM's sphere of influence, which is a good sign.

On my friend's company that's the role of customer support. To extract what people want and pass it to the workers that can provide it.

For receiving emails?

sure. try to be the first point of contact for a massive project for anyone under the sun including fellow developers, business users, IT heads, business heads, internal consultants, external consultants, SMEs etc etc. If you can handle all their queries (email/in-person/phone call/video conference), you certainly sir do not need your BA/PM.

No, for making it so that the rest of the team doesn't have to deal with emails from 7am to 1am.

Part of the PM's or manager's job (at least if they're a good one, anyway) is shielding the rest of the team from administrivia, so that they can be productive.

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