I am curious about Program Manager positions in tech companies like Google, Facebook, Uber etc. Can someone please throw some light on what exactly does this role involve? What exactly do you do as a Program Manager, and what kinds of projects do you work on?
Pretend you can do your job well. Deliver tangible things and be able to communicate its impact across teams. Now pretend someone else comes in and wants to "help you with that". They start asking why you don't do it this way or that way, and they have no technical experience so you have to guide them to the answer else they waste your team's time and take you down the wrong, inefficient route because they feel like they need to own something on the team. If you're lucky and geared them in then right direction it's finally time to "work together". What that means is that you'll have verbal sparring when trying to get this person to actually do work, else you just get countered and end up working the task to completion before you know what happened. One of these is a program manager. The most positive way I can think to look at it is a constant negative force bringing you down unless you do a great job on levels you never thought you'd have to. Keeps you well oiled if you are up to it but lessens your personal impact.
Don’t listen to these idiots. Think of a startup. To run efficiently you need people that think all day about designing efficient systems and writing code. You need different people that think all day about what problems are worth solving, what product to build, how to find customers, how to grow the product. In a big tech company it’s the same thing just on a much bigger scale. As things scale, technical designs and code become more complicated and so do the functions that a PM needs to worry about. It’s very easy for PMs to get lost and not know what to do. Good PMs find their way and create clarity for their teams and company to succeed. This requires a very wide range of skills, from technical to sales and marketing. More than anything the PM role is understanding what’s needed of you and learning what it takes to get it done.
Yes. Think of a startup. Notice how few program managers they have?
Yep, none. There are some project managers that truly own the idea and goal and have bodies to help them deliver. Program manager is some warped version of that. Either manage a specific project or a whole team. Not the "program" or service of the team. That's what the actual team manager is for.
Tech Industry
Yesterday
1707
Google New Grad fired, can’t find job
India
Yesterday
1716
Please vote sensibly 🙏
2024 Tax
Yesterday
4064
Biden’s new tax proposal is wild
2024 Presidential Election
Yesterday
2649
Biden ruined America and tech! Tax plans are insane
Tech Industry
Yesterday
25722
Google doing more layoffs, restructuring including country moves
The job involves getting paid to accomplish little. It's basically a secretarial job. Having said that, there are exceptions. But they're few and far between.