Ask HN: How can I become a proper Project Manager from a Programmer?

How does one get one of these non-management yet senior jobs? Companies like to talk about a "technical track" but I have yet to see anyone climb up it. I've seen senior engineers hired from outside into fellow type roles. But those seem to degenerate into management roles anyway.

Maybe I'm just not working for the right companies, but it really does look like the only way up is management.

My favorite books on project management:

1. "Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager" is a high-level but pretty complete introduction. It has good good examples from non-technical projects based on the Project Management Institute's infamous "Project Management Body of Knowledge" (PMBOK). https://amzn.com/194163110X

2. Scott Berkun's "Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management (Theory in Practice)". Scott was a program manager at Microsoft and describes some of the less process-oriented, more "in the trenches" aspects to managing a project. https://amzn.com/0596517718

3. Steve McConnell's "Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules". It's more of an encyclopedia of software project management and is now a bit dated (1996), pre-dating Scrum and Agile but all those ideas have been known for a long time. https://amzn.com/1556159005

Project management isn't really a management role. They are usually peers, often on a lower payscale than engineers.

I think it can be useful to have demonstrable working experience in management, even if it wasn't your career choice.

>According to the Project Management Institute (PMI), the term project stakeholder refers to, ‘an individual, group, or organization, who may affect, be affected by, or perceive itself to be affected by a decision, activity, or outcome of a project’ (Project Management Institute, 2013).

As a PM, I usually refer to the stakeholders as the people that requested the project, the people that pay for the project, and the people that need to be informed about any changes related to schedule, scope, cost, impediments, etc.

>What's the difference? A Project Manager is rarely a stakeholder, though it could happen if the stakeholder is actually managing all aspects of the project.

It may benefit you to read the PMBOK and read some books on Agile and Scrum techniques. There are still many projects that use waterfall methodologies and are successfully on-time and on-budget. I was once a Portfolio Manager for a large insurance company in charge of data migrations from acquired insurers...there is nothing that stand-ups and scrum could have done to make the migration process any faster or better. Point: learn the basic methodologies first, then build on your knowledge. Agile and Scrum in the wrong hands can be terribly destructive. Knowing which methodologies may work best for different teams/projects/situations is key. Sometimes the overhead and bloat of Agile isn't necessary for simple projects. I once briefly worked as a subcontracted developer for a crappy consulting/recruiting company. The company wanted to "provide value" to the client by mandating that the client's IT Director and I had daily conference calls with the company's scrum master who only had 6 months of PM experience (I had 8 years of exp at the time). Which wouldn't have been unusual except I was the only developer, the IT Director wasn't involved other than "get it done" and gave two shits less about the daily stand-ups and agile process to design a 3-page site and a couple of forms, all of which had excellent requirements docs. I ripped through the work and got out of there in a week. Why apply such a ridiculous process/methodology to something so simple?