I have 11+ years of experience, currently 300K TC. I am a senior dev at a large publicly traded company. I took this job because it was sold to me as development focused greenfield work and it was a decent pay bump. In my previous jobs i've worked as a lead with direct reports, in consulting, fortune 100 companies, startups, front end, back end, devops, etc. I have a pretty wide skill set, but also deep and narrow in some areas. In all my previous jobs, there has been some kind of project management, and its either driven by team leads, or via a project manager. Its kind of like, software engineering 101. On my current team, there is a lead and no project manger. We currently don't use any kind of task tracking or milestone tracking. So there is no real centralized tracking of requirements against tasks. No standups but otherwise lots of status meetings. We also have no sprints or task assignment meetings. In my opinion If there is no dedicated project manager, it should be up to the lead to ensure that tasks are created with technical requirements with deadlines against feedback from stakeholders. I believe a leads job is to translate requirements into technical docs and milestones, and either create tickets in the backlog, or work with senior devs or product managers to create tasks in the backlog. Leads also work with product managers and help create roadmaps. Between the lead, product manager, and other stakeholders, priorities are set or adjusted and work is done in 2 week sprints. Tasks either get done, or carry over depending on circumstances, but everything is oriented around milestones with release dates or deadlines. In the absence of a dedicated project manager the lead has to pick up the slack. The lead on my team does some of the above things, but its really difficult at the moment because we have a lot of projects, and requirements are getting lost. It's difficult to know what work is being done or what priorities are, in addition to milestones which represent deadlines for stakeholders. We have missed deadlines because we don't track our work or milestones in jira, despite having it available to us. Requirements are scattered across teams messages, spread sheets, word docs, etc, or I have to watch meeting recordings to try and gather this information. I don't necessarily believe in strict agile or pm methodologies. Points are useless, and so are the majority of scrum meetings, but all the successful teams I have worked on there was always some form of project management, and tools like jira, github issues, trello, pivotal tracker, ect were used to track at a bare minimum release requirements or milestones. I have talked to management, their answer was basically, yeah we recognize we don't have project management and its a problem, but nothing really has come from it yet. In fact from what I heard, there was someone who tried to implement strict process but were fired because of the friction it caused. So I am hesitant to try pursue improvements on my own. I have only been at the company a short time and I don't really want to quit just yet so trying to figure my next steps because I otherwise like my manager and I believe that they can help me move from senior to lead. However at the moment, I am miserable. Would you work on a team that doesn't track tasks? Are my opinions on what a lead is unreasonable? What are the expectations of a senior dev in this situation? How does a leads role change in the absence of a dedicated PM? Should I gtfo? #engineering #engineering #software #projectmanager
This is true, the worse the team level the more processes they have in place to force them to do work. Good ICs (L5) self manage
Do IC's at google have direct reports? I guess if you have reports and are a lead you don't you have to do *some* kind of task management with your reports?
If your team doesn't have pm, then you are your own pmš§
Scrum masters are scum of the earth. So annoying and 0 technical knowledge. And yet they are decently paid. They are glorified baby sitters for devs.
My current scrum master makes my life worse. Something will get brought up, and Iāll say something like āweāll have to talk about thatā or something innocent. And then she blurts out āI set up a meetingā. So she turns something that would have been a quick 5 minute one on one convo into a whole 30 minute team discussion just to make herself look useful. And then someone will like my manager will be saying something and sheāll interrupt with āyeah I was about to say thatā.
I have worked for Meta and Google teams without project management. Sometimes it works better, its up to each team to decide what works best... but lack of PM isn't unusual.