I left the government for corporate work, and we didn't have project managers as a specific role. Of course, people were managing projects, but it was nothing like it was in the government. In my short experience, project managers:

- Have no understanding of the technology they're "building."

- Don't understand who is responsible for what.

- Would have NO idea if things were set up incorrectly.

- Are solely working through a checklist of items and asking "is this done, or do you have dependencies?"

- The checklist itself was just built by interviewing different stakeholders, but it's the PM who puts it together and of course the PM who doesn't really understand the detailed or high level view of the project.

It's pretty maddening, and self-evidently stupid. I really cannot fathom why my company and other companies fail to understand what a waste of time and money this is. And worse, than the PMs are often leading to worse outcomes. Please keep this in mind anytime someone tells you that we need to "run government like a business," or suggests that businesses are wildly efficient whereas government is never efficient. If we had EVER had a useless PM like this back in government I would have forced them off the project as part of our criteria for success. In the corporate world, there's really no such option, because project success is always secondary to the businesses wants.