[morganherlocker]

> A good engineer can PM his own work,

A good engineer can do lots of things on their own, many of which are a poor use of their time.

Any engineer working on a sufficiently complex project will spend 100% of their time in meetings without a PM. Even if your average engineer is better at PMing than your average PM (a belief that requires some serious hubris), if the engineer is left with no time for building things then zero work gets done.

[omarkatzen]

Any engineer working on a sufficiently complex project will spend 100% of their time in meetings without a PM.

Well, that's just dysfunctional. If "stakeholders" are that demanding of peoples' time, then they are the problem.

If your culture isn't engineer-driven, you have bigger problems and the number of PMs you have becomes basically irrelevant.

[morganherlocker]

> If "stakeholders" are that demanding of peoples' time

Sure, for 1 or 2 stakeholders. What if there are dozens? Big projects have lots of requirements and lots of people to coordinate. This is not a small task that can just be hand-waved away.

> If your culture isn't engineer-driven..

Engineers are important and there are notable examples of companies being engineer driven, however you are dismissing the vast majority of companies with your statement. Considering a good chunk of startups are CRUD apps on top of a UI framework of some variety, I doubt many tech startups even need to be engineer driven these days.