I have a good project manager and he’s receiving pressure from our VP to become a bad one. “Oh, you give your team autonomy and a sense of ownership over their work? Well, we’re gonna need you to implement more time tracking so we can charge our clients appropriately.”

They’re just assholes who can’t get over the fact that working from home may allow us to work fewer hours while remaining equally productive.

120 job applications in a day is a lot, good job. i get burnt out just sending a couple

A good PM makes all the difference but its rare to come across any. My current one has the memory of a goldfish and is more interested in telling me how to code even though he's a novice programmer who's never done anything professionally.

So far at my current job I've dealt with five different PMs.

The first one is really good. Used to be a dev. Big fuck-work-energy. They handle all the administrative bullshit that I don't know or care about. They check in on the devs every now and then. Lots of constructive feedback and praise. They managed to make some kind of contract with the customer that pretty enabled me to do jack shit and get paid for it most of the time without anyone raising eyebrows.

The second one is good, pretty average PM. Used to be a dev themselves since the 90's, so they understand the developer's point of view. Easy to work with.

The third one is just kind of there. Handles the admin stuff and that's it. The devs (i.e. I) do most of the interactions with the customer, since the PM doesn't really know wtf the project is even about.

The fourth one isn't even there. Sometimes I don't even know if they've quit or what, because I never see or hear from them. The ultimate quiet quitter. Once they showed up to some friday afternoon function, said "sup?" chugged a beer and devoured a pizza in ten seconds (rolled it up and ate it like a burrito!!), and went home. My main inspiration, my number one career goal.

The fifth one was garbage though. Made all sorts of unrealistic promises to the customers and took it out on the devs when we couldn't deliver in time. They quit at some point, and the project transfered to PM #1.

I concur very much. Can't even describe how jealous I am that my team lead just quit, I wish it was me. Now I have to take his role at basically the busiest time on the project, fucking hell

I'm not entirely sure if there's a significant difference between project manager and program manager but I'd be happy to refer you to the open program manager positions (and any other relevant ones to your skills/experience) in my company

A good PM is golden and can do so much to help a team work (like running interference for you. OK, mostly running interference for you). That also doesn't tend to line up with making management feel like they are extracting the maximum possible value from a team, so they tend to get removed from that position

Anyway, godspeed. May you find a job you don't hate

Hearing the things my partner has been through on various projects I gotta agree with this meme.

I don’t have words to make your situation better, but hope you have some good responses from sending out applications. Most managers suck and are an obstacle to doing our jobs, in any industry, so I feel your pain

Holy that's a lot of applications.

sends all the good vibes I can muster

I have seen lot's of fail sons and fail daughters end up in the PM role. If you dig into their past, they have an ivy league degree, come from money, are connected to an investor/shareholder in some weird way, and are totally incompetent.

That said, I've also worked with some really good PMs that made my job as a programmer/capitalist task master (manager of programmers) easier.

edit: Just realized OP is referencing Project Manager, not Product. Although, after 10 years in this industry I still don't understand the difference.

A good PM can make or break an entire dev team. I'll let you know if I ever meet one. Good luck with your hunt.

I should really get off my ass and start looking around myself, but I'm at that stage in my software dev career where I'm about ready to just go live off the grid in a fucking cabin in the woods

There are so many bad ones, they crowd out the few that are actually good and it's a shame.

Used to work in accounts payable for a tech agency. Absolutely depressing the number of project managers making six figures who couldn’t figure out “click on this box to e-sign the document.”