[flipgimble]

I’ve worked with a number of Fortune 500 companies and seen many examples of a disfuncional culture. I’ve seen in those places that PMs solve most problems with the one tool at their disposal: meetings. Incentives for promotions are such that the bigger your meeting the more important you are. I’ve been in hi dress of hours of cross functions team meeting where 1-2 people did any work, and usually the PM talked the whole time, while 10-20ppl are on mute and only sign off at the end to show they indeed exist. The end result see teams of dejected engineers that don’t have time for actual technical work, and are asked to give estimates or commitments on the spot without any research or even understanding of the code. I’ve seen PMs reject technical designs because they didn’t like the number or “points”, and engineers just had to reformat the same ideas into different “tickets” to satisfy some inscrutable PM aesthetics. Entire projects delayed and derailed because of lack of understanding and pointless status signaling rituals. On the other hand I’ve worked with brilliant PM who protected the team from such nonsense and helped them stay focused on the right goal. These people are invaluable as much as the others are detrimental.