Comment by Waterluvian
2 years ago
I’ve met a lot of project managers who are competent and see the bigger picture. They actually pay attention and understand why the numbers are what they are. They respect that the numbers are a very flawed tool and cannot be utilized without context or understanding.
I’ve also met a lot of project managers who are there because they’re incompetent. They lean heavily on “agile” and “best practices” and say moronic stuff like, “can you show me how many lines of code each developer has added this month?” (this happened to me. I fought it hard, explaining that it’s not a meaningful metric. I showed him a month that I wrote -1500 lines of code).
I feel like I could say the same about managers, coders, executives. The incompetent exist everywhere and they lean heavily on bureaucracy to protect their existence.
Ive even seen good managers hold a few incompetents on purpose in preparation of layoff cycles in larger companies that do them consistently.