[mschuster91]

> My experience working at Big tech companies is that people with roles like “agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers add questionable value.

"Agile" can go and die in a hellfire for all I care.

But good technical project managers aka "bridges between the higher-up beancounters and the workers" are worth their weight in gold.

[AbbeFaria]

At MSFT, Product Managers were Technical Program Managers. Yes, a good PM is a joy to work with.

[joe_mamba]

>But good technical project managers aka "bridges between the higher-up beancounters and the workers" are worth their weight in gold.

Yeah but it's not easy do distinguish those from the snake oil salesmen who are just good at smooth talking during the interviews.

[vishalontheline]

Pretty easy. Get them to talk about a project they've managed and start poking holes. Who was on the team? How did they organize meetings? What were the bottlenecks? How well did everyone get along? What did they do to help grease the gears? Did they have to change the process? How did they like the software? Which software did they use? Did they have to administer it themselves? How did they deal with management changes / team changes / tons of support requests / issues in production? Where did they draw the line between PM work and engineering work?

[joe_mamba]

From witching other managers, and via LLMs, you can literally learn and interview prep for all those questions on and lie. It's not difficult.

[vishalontheline]

People have a very difficult time keeping their story together, especially when they're asked a couple of questions that interview prep didn't cover.

Beyond that though, there's the probation period. If they can't do the job, they're supposed to be let go before they become permanent.

Trouble I see from most interviewers is a tendency of asking questions with a "right" answer. Those tend to be a lot easier to game. They then fallback on sorting applicants by pedigree - the old, "no one ever got fired for choosing IBM" method.

Then, they come back and rant about how PM's are trash, and Agile is trash, etc. etc.

[jimbokun]

Well if they’ve learned that much it’s a good thing.

The remaining piece is to speak with some personal references to verify they did some real work.

[joe_mamba]

>The remaining piece is to speak with some personal references to verify they did some real work.

Not a thing where I am. You can BS your way in these jobs and so many people did.

There's no LEETCODE for management positions, just bullshitting smooth-talk and using your connections (nepotism).

[hn_throwaway_99]

Well, quite frankly, you work in a shitty place then that doesn't know how to competently interview for these positions.

There are real differences in the knowledge and work behavior of great PMs and the bullshitters, and it's usually not that hard to tease out the bullshit in an interview if you know what you're doing.