[kenjackson]

You have never worked with a good PM. I've worked with incredible PMs. I've seen these PMs walk into meeting with senior developers and architects, and pretty much be the only person asking the right question regarding how to get the product shipped.

And that for me has been one of the defining characteristics of a strong PM. Good questioning ability. Ability to skip to the chase. And they have a suprisingly strong grasp of dependencies. When architect A says, "this is coming in a bit late" they almost instantly are getting the PMs and architects from team X, Y, and Z in the room because they know theres an indirect relationship to these teams also.

I've only worked with one bad PM in my life. We fired him after two months. The difference in productivity, confidence, and general life enjoyment between an bad and good PM is pretty enormous.

[slantyyz]

My experience in the services realm is that there are way more bad PMs than good PMs.

I've seen way too many PMs too afraid to push back on the customer with respect to scope changes who also have no idea how the technical staff think and therefore have no idea how to communicate with them.

I've also found that PMs with more certifications tended to have less of a clue in terms of how to run a project, but that's just my experience.