The thing is that people on here think project managers are evil incarnate and just useless middle management.

It requires a very specific skill set to be able to lead a technical project and cut through the bullshit on BOTH SIDES: the client asking for features and the team building the product.

Clients always either ask for stuff they don't really need or have vague requirements that crystallise only 3 days after the deadline. "Of course when we said it needs to do foo, it also MUST do bar, doh!"

And teams tend to overestimate their ability to deliver and underestimate the work needed to get to the finish. (Infinite coast problem).

There's also several more classes of B.S., for what it's worth.

An exaggerated/anonymized version of a recent one I got, from an otherwise-really-strong senior engineer: "Of course when I said we would put a button there, it also meant we MUST build an entire UI framework from scratch, with full test coverage for the entire thing!"

...actually, that's not even that exaggerated. Shipping software at big companies can be unreasonably difficult, sometimes.

Yea, I've had the privilege of working with a few _excellent_ project managers (or Producers as they're called in gaming) and they work literal magic.

I've studied project management, I've managed projects and lead teams, but holy crap those people are on a whole other level with how well they gather and disseminate information and communicate it effectively.

None of them could code themselves out of a wet paper bag, but that's not the skill they get hired for.

It's actually really hard to do well. Moreover, it suffers from "how hard could it really be" syndrome, especially when working with developers who think they're smarter than everybody. It's the kind of job that a software developer approches from first principals and does a terrible job at, because starting from first principals ignores all of humanity's experience and practice managing projects, and projects have existed since before the Great Pyramids in Egypt.

We have better tools today, but it takes a skilled practitioner to wield them well. Yes I'm talking about Jira and I hate sitting down and pointing things too, but managing a large complex project with a large number of humans is real actual work and a full time job in and of itself. sometimes even more than one person can handle. places that I've seen are successful are able to recognize that, and don't treat it as dead weight.

Good project managers are rare. They need to have some real experiences working on some projects and then some managing projects. It's rarer than good engineering managers IMO.