To give you some perspective from an ex-softie (been on the outside for 7 years now, so my experience is not recent). PMs are the hated super-political, credit grabbing ruling class of Microsoft. She was a junior PM. It's not clear what most of them actually do. When I was there, they pretended to "design" features, where in reality the specs were written by devs, they just took credit for them. Then they sat around in meetings and "managed the schedule" and "reported status" to one another. Since there are (or at least were) so many of them at Microsoft, the whole "reporting status" thing can self-perpetuate, because at some point the communication overhead begins to dominate. As a result, most PMs just interfere with work and slow things down, sometimes dramatically so.
This was the result of someone deciding, some 20-25 years ago, that developers couldn't handle talking to one another, and they couldn't test software themselves. I sort of agree with the latter point, but only when it comes to manual and end-to-end testing. Developers have an overriding priority: to get stuff out the door, whether it's ready or not. That's what they get promoted for. Any kind of deep testing beyond unit tests is considered, by and large, a waste of time, especially by junior devs who haven't been through support hell yet.
PMs though? You could easily have one or two of them per team of 20 devs if they do their work well, not 1:1 as it sometimes is at Microsoft. Shit, for the past 7 years I haven't worked with any PMs at all, and my productivity is at all time high.
So when I found out recently that Microsoft is getting rid of the formal test discipline (a mistake, IMO, for reasons outlined above, should have merely reduced their scope to high value work), I thought about PMs as well. Bite the pillow, my PM brethren, Satya is going in dry. I imagine once the second shoe falls, Microsoft will once again be a pretty decent place to work.
This was the result of someone deciding, some 20-25 years ago, that developers couldn't handle talking to one another, and they couldn't test software themselves. I sort of agree with the latter point, but only when it comes to manual and end-to-end testing. Developers have an overriding priority: to get stuff out the door, whether it's ready or not. That's what they get promoted for. Any kind of deep testing beyond unit tests is considered, by and large, a waste of time, especially by junior devs who haven't been through support hell yet.
PMs though? You could easily have one or two of them per team of 20 devs if they do their work well, not 1:1 as it sometimes is at Microsoft. Shit, for the past 7 years I haven't worked with any PMs at all, and my productivity is at all time high.
So when I found out recently that Microsoft is getting rid of the formal test discipline (a mistake, IMO, for reasons outlined above, should have merely reduced their scope to high value work), I thought about PMs as well. Bite the pillow, my PM brethren, Satya is going in dry. I imagine once the second shoe falls, Microsoft will once again be a pretty decent place to work.