I am glad to see all the pent up anger toward project managers. I quietly rage against them daily. I have even made up acronyms like "LIS" for "like I said", "DBR" for "Drive by requests" and "OSR" for "one sentence requirements". I write them on my white board and the don't know what it means.

I'm working with a PM for the first time in my 10 year career. I'm happy to have a buffer between myself and the client. lol Anybody else?

My PM is wonderful. It's part of his job to make my life go more smoothly, and he does. My client certainly does a lot of the things people on here complain about their PMs doing. My PM tries to push back against the bad behavior.

I think part of being a good PM is trying to make developers happy and effective, and so the PMs that people complain about on here probably aren't good PMs.

I have worked with both good and bad PM's.

I love you

@zornslemma @shittywebdev Agreed. But from my experience, you often get PMs who understand very little about what they're managing. When they do, it's their bosses who don't.

Well I don't even have that. I started my job 3 years ago as a second web developer and as a member of the marketing team.

http://tapsla.sh

I somehow managed to go from a single man writing spaghetti PHP to leading the charge on implementing an 18 month development timeline, managing $800,000 in AdWords, connecting a MSSQL server to our LAMP server via VPN with a DreamFactory API layer on top to retrieve query responses.

@lquessenberry you are proving my point that a good team can self organize and without a pure project management role that is usually hired by upper management to wrangle devs, who they think cost too much anyway.

I've never had a PM before since I was a freelancer for 5 years prior to this position. I took that "I'm the boss" mentality into my position now and my supervisors mostly just get out of the way once I lay out a course of action. The way I look at it is that they have no clue how to do it so they're not going to interfere. I always include strengths and weaknesses in the plan and use that to assign roles from each team member accordingly but i'm not the PM either. We just work in harmony.