It’s two decades of experience speaking. I didn’t speak about managers though. I was a manager for a couple of years before my undiagnosed ADHD made itself know when I had my first baby. Management has nothing to do with project management. I’m solely speaking about the horde of pseudo jobbers who work as middlemen between developers and whatever it is that developers are supposed to do. I’ve never encountered one which wasn’t a waste of resources except for business process and lean consultants who would actually do change management on the business side before anyone attempted doing any form of digitalisation.

I probably should have said “won’t code anymore” because that is what I meant. It’s the developers who become project managers, architects, agile whatever. Luckily I don’t have to deal with that anymore because I’ve become specialised in helping startups in-fuck their chaos as they transition into enterprise organisations. Many of them never make it because of how their internal processes are hindered by all sorts of “best practices”.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t excellent project managers out there. As I said, I’ve worked with some myself. Far too often project managers don’t actually do anything. I recently worked a team which has 1 PM, 1 Manager, 3 IT business partners and one architect in front of two developers. Today they have two developers and one IT business partner, who’s really an accountant that got into coding because he liked it. But is now capable of explaining the business to the developers.

It’s obviously not like that everywhere and I’m happy for you if you’ve had a better track record than me. I would argue that it is perhaps you who lack the experience that you seem to think I do. Because it’s not just on SWE you’ll find an abundance of bullshit jobs once an organisation reaches 100-500 employees.