( ( laughs in old… ) )

12 year SDE + 12 year TPM vet here.

Do everything you can to help your software engineers (or whoever is doing the work) have as much focus time as they need. Buffer your meetings and questions to one chunk of time per day. Encourage them to block-out and protect their focus time. And encourage the team to keep office hours so they can still make themselves available to others, but in a controlled way.

Be transparent with the business’s goals and frustrations you are facing. There’s an attitude (often among inexperienced devs) that PMs are good for nothing; just an interface to the rest of the business, and a source of where tasks come from. And some certainly are that, but a good PM is worth their weight in gold.

Find a good mentor, and start thinking about your next career step now.

Periodic office hours are tremendously helpful as well.

Block an hour, once or twice a week, for people to come by an ask you (and your team) about literally anything they want. And open it to everyone at your organization. Have your team stop answering one-off questions and tell people to bring it to office hours.

Team leads and tpms should help with logistics, messaging and hand-slapping.

Dancing colors; smothered, covered and topped.

No wonder I can’t find a TPM job anywhere. The senior devs are doing all my work.

There was that one DuckTales episode about it….

It’s a result of Jimmy Carter’s dairy subsidies. There was a Planet Money episode about it, and the origin of the phrase “government cheese”:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/31/643486297/episode-862-big-government-cheese

Spudboy by Spazz https://youtu.be/w_bxv5Yz0OM

Television programming? It’s a stretch, one might say a broad-casting of the term.

Mike Stoklasa of Red Letter Media is a meme image now? Mike Stoklasa of Red Letter Media is a meme image now.

I was reading that to the tune of the chorus of The Distance by Cake. It worked until the last line.

Related film recommendation:

Smoking Causes Coughing (2022, dir Quentin Dupieux)

It would be a crime against humanity to dilute the stunning natural beauty and magnificence of Yooper culture.

Y’all should check out Cells at Work: Code Black.

“The two hardest problems in programming are cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.”