State of the Market

[Cirrus]

I suspect the situation with PM is different when comparing pissy little software projects with something of importance.

I've managed projects with 200 people on them. When people on here post that projects don't need management and the smart way now is to have scrum masters, there is only one word for their knowledge and experience: pitiful

[PerfectStorm]

PMs haven't gone away, they're just called Scrum Masters or some other bollards instead

[Cirrus]

Saying you can run projects without project managers and instead use scrum masters is like saying you can run countries without prime ministers and use people like Boris Johnson or Donald Trump - ie utterly ridiculous and resulting in death and destruction on a grand scale.

Therefore neither is likely to happen in real life...

[nomadd]

Saying you can run projects without project managers and instead use scrum masters is like saying you can run countries without prime ministers and use people like Boris Johnson or Donald Trump - ie utterly ridiculous and resulting in death and destruction on a grand scale.

Therefore neither is likely to happen in real life...

True. We had half a dozen PMs at my last site who all did a pretty good job, tbh.

They were all from India, via the same large consultancy; we were charged £180-200 per PM per day.

So the questions to the PMs on here is - do you want to be playing in that arena?

[SussexSeagull]

I do love the way some people completely dismiss a role on the grounds they haven't encountered one for a couple of years!

Not everyone has adopted agile and frankly a lot who claim they have haven't. Agile was supposed to be the death knell for BAs and dedicated testers but both groups seem to rumble on. Basically coders and higher management have a dream where you can have a way of working involving developers talking to users and no one else is needed.

Problem is it never works that way.

[simes]

That’s so 2018 thinking
PM role is retired

Oh please change the record fella.

Saying the same thing repeatedly isn't going to make your point any stronger than the first time you said - presumably in 2018.

My last role ending end March paid me just shy of £700/day. So it seems that for a few, it is still a term to be searched for, and paid for.

From an agent friend

3 years ago at Xmas they had 3000+ PM roles available
2 years ago they had just over a thousand
Last year they had a few hundred
At Xmas this year they had none

Without wishing to be churlish, that might say more about the agent's relationship with the client than any other...?

If there is a project, there is someone to manage it. Call him/her what you will, but if Products need Product Managers, in the same thinking, so too Projects.

[MisterLysenkiy]

3 years ago at Xmas they had 3000+ PM roles available
2 years ago they had just over a thousand
Last year they had a few hundred
At Xmas this year they had none

trusting your figures as given, it still does not answer my question: why this declining trend happens?

[jayn200]

Bogus.

PM is not unskilled, market has taken a dip, most if not all projects are on hold or cancelled. Once things pick up, these PM actors will be required to carry out the necessary.

What are the skills? What degree is required to do the job? How long would it take for someone who has never done a degree or worked before to be trained to do a PM role? If the answer is less than 3-6 months(average probation period) then you can't really call it a skilled job. Sure there are soft skills but you can say that about literally any job.

Again not saying it as an insult. Some very high paying jobs in society are unskilled.

[Cirrus]

trusting your figures as given, it still does not answer my question: why this declining trend happens?

I had an MSc in Computer Science. I had been a business manager. I had worked in many sectors on many initiatives. I had programmed in several languages in many contexts. I had tuned huge database systems. So I was entitled to be a project manager, right?

But the problem is I've seen loads of project managers who have little or no idea about the complexities of software design and construction, hardware, databases, testing,business domain knowledge etc etc. Yet they do a passable job as a PM. Many times they do a really quite good job. At the end of the day being a PM is something you can potentially just sit down and do in a way you couldn't just walk in and be a C#.NET programmer without some years of practice (of one sort or another).

There's always a need for project managers but whether companies have to go outside and advertise to get somebody with lots of experience, well that's an entirely different matter.

(Note, on occasions - which is rare on big projects - I have had a look at developers' code, it has often been tulipe so don't necessarily assume you have to be at all good to get a job as a coding despite all the long list of products you need to be familiar with)

[GhostofTarbera]

What are the skills? What degree is required to do the job? How long would it take for someone who has never done a degree or worked before to be trained to do a PM role? If the answer is less than 3-6 months(average probation period) then you can't really call it a skilled job. Sure there are soft skills but you can say that about literally any job.

Again not saying it as an insult. Some very high paying jobs in society are unskilled.

Same for programmers, 6 months you can master any language (or enough for 99% contacts) and blag the other 1 %

What degree has helped in any contract?


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