Ask HN: How can I become a proper Project Manager from a Programmer? • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 13, 2016, 6:31 AM UTC

badminton1 wrote: post #48

impostervt wrote: post #43

You don't have to transition. Think hard before you do. I became an engineering manager at around 26, and did it for another 5 years, and thought that was my future. But I transitioned jobs and ended up getting back into development, and realized a few things: - I hate meetings, and PMs go to meetings. A lot. - PMs have less control then you probably think. - Writing code means I get to actually make stuff. At the en…

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

[deleted]

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

#62

Post by spaceisballer » Tue, Sep 13, 2016, 2:41 PM UTC

See if there are any certifications your organization prefers. My work values people with PMP certifictations, or at the very least a Masters Certificate in Project Management (which they offer on site).

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

#63

Post by __derek__ » Tue, Sep 13, 2016, 4:57 PM UTC

jf22 wrote: post #56

impostervt wrote: post #43

You don't have to transition. Think hard before you do. I became an engineering manager at around 26, and did it for another 5 years, and thought that was my future. But I transitioned jobs and ended up getting back into development, and realized a few things: - I hate meetings, and PMs go to meetings. A lot. - PMs have less control then you probably think. - Writing code means I get to actually make stuff. At the en…

>it was often hard to point to anything as a real accomplishment. You never feel a sense of accomplishment for making sure your developers are happily productive? I'm a manager now and my team's high output and positive morale makes me extremely satisfied and proud.

I see that as the point of GP's comment: different people get satisfaction from different things, and different people excel at different things. That's normal.

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

#64

Post by JamesBarney » Tue, Sep 13, 2016, 10:01 PM UTC

numlocked wrote: post #37

debacle wrote: post #32

99% of the time "Project Manager" means "Project Facilitator." The key aspects of project management are gating, communicating up, and communicating down. Gating: Keeping things that aren't The Project from becoming The Project without being properly defined (time, deliverables, budget, resources). Communicating Up: Letting business owners and stakeholders know the status and cadence of the project, what the project…

To add one more: a sense of urgency. Your job isn't to whip the team, but you should provide a steady drumbeat of progress, and be able to instill urgency and speed into the team.

That technical debt isn't going to write itself :).

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

#65

Post by bitwize » Wed, Sep 14, 2016, 5:05 AM UTC

quantumhobbit wrote: post #39

bitwize wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it can't be measured, it can't be managed. Remember that your manager is accountable to someone else higher up the chain. They don't know how dev works, but they want to see quantifiable progress. Statistics, spreadsheets, and tools like Jira are how that progress gets communicated. Like it or not, this is an essential part of the business.

The best measure of how a project is going is using the software it is producing. Instead of using questionable data from Jira and the like, just try to use the software. Ask for a demo, or run the code yourself, or look through unit and acceptance tests.

Direct supervisors can do that and get a detailed feel for how it's going. But that's too touchy feely, too many variables. C-level execs want to know "are we on track to ship version 3.0 by the end of the quarter?" and they need a yes/no answer, justified by numbers and graphs. They don't know about unit tests, and can't be bothered to walk through the software itself.

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

#66

Post by atmosx » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 4:53 PM UTC

marktangotango wrote: post #26

cube00 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with not going overboard with stats and Jira. However being good with these tools to help measure velocity and improve the quality of estimates reduces the pressure on the team when clients plant the seeds of doubt that you've over estimated.

I agree it's possible to go overboard, but I find that a lot of developers don't appreciate how useful it is to have documentation of what the team is doing and visibility (ie numbers) into how time is being spent. A lot of developers hate tracking task in jira or any task tracker, but whenever deadlines start being missed due to roadblocks thrown up by other teams, or ineffective project management, having that all…

I don't know, Jira feels like a conspiracy theory in action: Atlassian somehow tricked management into adopting JIRA. Then the management had to pay insane prices for external plugins in order to allow programmers to do trivial things like displaying in a visually appealing way hours spent over a week.

It's really an awesome business model. Worked great for Microsoft.