Re: I'm a developer... WAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!
Developing code is a mixture of a mechanical and craft skills along the lines of a bricklayer a plumber or numerous other trades. Anyone who does it can recognise skill in others by the elegance of effort, speed of production and quality of the work they produce.
Unlike bricklayers who can usually estimate how long to build repetitive designs made from common components;.most businesses commission unique systems, because they believe themselves to be unique and special.(doubtful). Consequently the system we are expected to produce is a pioneer with a huge number of unknowns.
Programming also operates at many scales from a cool line, a neat function, a tidy module and a finished app. Being able to see the whole project across these scales is a definite skill and quite often different developers work better at different scales. A succesful PM should be able to see all scales.
Most programmers bitch about project management because it's practitioners tend to be purely amateur accountants who think that guiding a project to success is purely about coming in under budget. Maybe if PMs started their meetings with "How are we going to do this bit.?" rather than "When will it be ready? Oh come on it's already been promised two weeks earlier than that." they would be appreciated more.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
