this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
929 points (93.6% liked)
Microblog Memes
7524 readers
3038 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Man, gotta disagree here. There are deadweights under every job title. Had a pm that literally carried the team on her back, while simultaneously shielding us from bullshit from on high.
Yeah, my team actually has a mix of great, good, and replacement level PMs. The bad ones either get let go or moved elsewhere. It helps that we tend to draw them from the roles that would be on projects they'd manage and seem to compensate them well enough that we retain all the good ones.
If an org can't find good PMs, the org needs to create them and pay them enough that they stick in the role. It's not easy, but it's not rocket science.
Nail on the head there. So many PMs are either outside the industry entirely or pulled from completely unrelated projects and it's just a disaster.
I've definitely seen both extremes. It's insane the difference a good PM makes, but they're rare because of how much pressure they have to handle. It's an ungrateful job.
Unfortunately, you're right about as much as the original meme is. At my current gig, I've worked with half a dozen PMs, and while the majority of them were (seemingly) sweet and nice people, at least half of them would struggle to pour piss out of a boot if you wrote instructions on the heel. Even with project templates and runbooks, we still regularly had to clean up after them because they didn't do part of the project or expected us to work on stuff that wasn't marked as being live yet.
Acceptable ones aren't too rare, that is, ones that don't have negative productivity -- depending on the industry and company politics, in some places it's BS all the way down. Good ones are rare and stellar ones are unicorns as it's a dual mastery thing: You have to be good at both the technical aspects, as well as the people aspect, and neither of those two can be mere talent, it needs to be talent and education. Judging by Alice Cecile, being a systems ecologist is the right overall qualification.
There are definitely some amazing PMs, but I've met way more terrible PMs who don't know shit about fuck and don't care to learn than good PMs.