In my experience, a PM handles a lot of the crap work that engineers shouldn't be working on. A PM keeps management apprised of progress. A PM handles the work involved in keeping Gantt charts up to date. A PM coordinates with dependents and dependencies to make sure resources and components are available when needed.
If you don't appreciate the value of that, you maybe have worked on smaller projects or not been in a large org that pushes those menial tasks onto engineers. PMs are there to facilitate engineers. They do not rule over them. They make targeted, efficient queries of engineers' status and then communicate and coordinate appropriately.
I would love to see PMs hired at my org. We're currently drowning in process-related tasks and it's mostly because we do not have PMs(the process is mostly necessary, but wastes engineer time). I'd also love to have some technical writers on staff. Having engineers write documentation, beyond, say, doxygen comments in header files, is just dumb. Right now our user facing docs have little consistency or defined scope. They don't target a well defined audience, and don't effectively communicate to our users.
Let engineers do what they do best, and enable them to be productive by hiring helpers as needed.
If you don't appreciate the value of that, you maybe have worked on smaller projects or not been in a large org that pushes those menial tasks onto engineers. PMs are there to facilitate engineers. They do not rule over them. They make targeted, efficient queries of engineers' status and then communicate and coordinate appropriately.
I would love to see PMs hired at my org. We're currently drowning in process-related tasks and it's mostly because we do not have PMs(the process is mostly necessary, but wastes engineer time). I'd also love to have some technical writers on staff. Having engineers write documentation, beyond, say, doxygen comments in header files, is just dumb. Right now our user facing docs have little consistency or defined scope. They don't target a well defined audience, and don't effectively communicate to our users.
Let engineers do what they do best, and enable them to be productive by hiring helpers as needed.