> graveyard is full of irreplaceable people

I am not special and make no claims of it; I am entirely replaceable and I'd make no claims to the contrary.

This has nothing to do with me or anyone like me, and everything to do with the "adult daycare" style of project managers.

I'm tired of re-iterating to non-technical project managers that status of tickets, why things are "blocked" or why the ask isn't feasible given constraints, over and over again. Time is a flat-circle.

If they understood the problem scope better, such questions would not arise. I know this from experience.

The majority of them are completely stateless and I'll repeat things daily for weeks on end, explaining the same things over and over again, while they make 0 effort to "unblock" issues.

I've had one good project manager in my career that advocated for his technical staff and understood the both the project and business deeply; he was invaluable and a pleasure to work with.

I've had many many others that served no tangible purpose whatsoever.

My frustration is ostensibly there is a purpose for these jobs beyond employing people with the role of "attending meetings"; I've rarely seen it.

Your username is apt, because working with you sounds like encountering the Crawling Chaos Himself, an eldritch being of pure condescension and disdain who unknowingly makes everybody else's lives miserable because they fundamentally do not respect anybody else except themself. Best of luck to you.

Project Manager here. I wish software were an industry where my job was not needed! Where the software team could just directly tell the boss: "It will be done in 3 months. Trust us, bro!" and they go off to do work without a single status report or a single meeting, and come back exactly 3 months later with a finished, tested and working product, ready for distribution! God that would be so great. I could just chill out, tell my boss and boss's boss to chill out, that the software team's got this, with 100% confidence that it was true. Or, I could go find some more useful career!

But it's never true. Team A depends on Team B, who is busy with work for Team C, and none of these teams are talking to each other because they're too busy writing code. Team D just lost two people and can't make the date that they promised, which sets Teams E and F back a few months unless we can figure it out. Or they're behind because they up and decided to do a big refactoring in the middle of the project without telling anyone. Or people just estimated poorly, like orders-of-magnitude poorly, and while the marketing team is ready, and the trade shows are scheduled, and the factory is ramping the device that the software should be flashed on, but the software won't be ready for another three months.

I empathize with engineers since I was once one, and can understand why some of them think our job is useless. We tend to interact with them in places that Software Engineers hate, like in meetings and standups and via "update" E-mail blasts. Or we're sending them JIRA tickets which they also hate. I do my best to shield my teams from these things that I know they don't like, but sometimes they have to happen.