Project Management For Programmers?

welshdave asks: "I'm a senior web developer in a medium sized company where the project managers have no programming experience of any sort. I'm of the opinion that project managers should understand the projects that they're managing and want to move into project management myself. I'm aware that I may meet resistance from the current project managers - many of them have been hired with no previous experience of anything. Previous suggestions to senior management that myself and other developers would feel better with a technical person running projects have been dismissed. As a result we are routinely told to skip testing or to implement the impossible, with an emphasis on how things look rather than how well things actually work. Has anyone else found the barrier to project management is their technical knowledge. How did you get past it?"

Comments

Project management is bullshit anyways

[Pig Hogger]

I knew that, but it was brillantly confirmed by a class on computer project management I took 2 years ago.

The teacher was a moonlighter, having a day job for the political police as a senior project manager. First of all, the class had three times the ordinary number of people, so we wasted three weeks splitting the group in three.

Then we had to work on our projects in teams of 10 people, which made managing the meetings as much work as doing the project itself.

Then I was canned, because when you're 38 years old, you just cannot learn by heart a 50 paragraph text like a 18 year old can (and then the teacher said that there was plenty of erroneous information in the text). I was canned despite our group project ending at second place when it was evaluated by the second in command of the political police...

So, if you like bullshit and nonsense stuff, go for project management.