Technical program manager
So far I have been an SDE and dev ops. I got an interview call for a technical program manager role. What does a technical program manager do ? How different is the landscape of a technical program manager compared to that of a software engineer ?
Amazon aop777 Feb 22
TPMs work main responsibility is to beg SDEs for a breakdown of the projects and then beg for dates for each of the tasks… and then every week they have to put a random color on the project, some like to be always green but others like to be always red to increase the pressure. Most of them don’t like to be yellow… If you can’t code, maybe is an option… if you like coding more than what you like to talking to people that you need but don’t care about you… then you will hate being a tpm…
You are not expected to code. But be able to make technical assessments or make technical decisions on the go. Understand the overall picture of and create roadmaps and identify dependencies and risks. You would be setting up meetings and bringing people together but mainly to get things done, depending how involved you are you could get hands on things too, but that's extremely rare. Different from a non technical program manager that besides not being able to code, a lot struggle to understand the technical pieces of projects.