Treating project managers like kids: 10 relationship-building tips poster parody
Description
A colorful vertical poster shows the bold black heading "10 WAYS to Build Relationships with Kids." The words "with Kids" are struck through in red and replaced by handwritten red capitals reading "WITH PROJECT MANAGERS," with the small red scribble "programming" underneath. Ten horizontal bars - blue, purple, green, orange, blue, purple, teal, yellow, green, blue - list the following text respectively: "1 Talk to them about non-school related subjects.", "2 Let them teach you about their interests.", "3 Remember things about their lives.", "4 Share about your own life.", "5 Engage in activities with them.", "6 Tell hilarious (and even embarrassing) stories.", "7 Share inspirational stories from your life.", "8 Do crazy things.", "9 Use their interests in your lessons and activities.", "10 Apologize when you mess up." The meme humorously equates managing project managers to caring for children, highlighting the soft-skill and communication hurdles senior developers face. It satirizes corporate culture and the sometimes child-like stakeholder expectations that engineers must navigate
Comments
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For tip #5, I just hand the PM a whiteboard marker and let them redesign the microservice graph - keeps them happily coloring arrows while I quietly refactor the monolith
After 20 years in tech, I've learned that treating PMs like kindergarteners is surprisingly effective - especially the 'apologize when you mess up' part after explaining why their 'simple feature request' requires rewriting the entire authentication layer
The fact that 'Apologize when you mess up' is #10 perfectly captures the developer-PM dynamic: we'll do literally everything else - including teaching them about programming and doing 'crazy things' - before admitting the production incident was actually our fault. Though to be fair, it was probably a requirements issue anyway
Roadmap SLO jumped to 99.9% after implementing soft‑skills middleware: GET /pm/hobbies over coffee and 429 on “just a quick change” requests
Working with PMs is like running a distributed system: keep communications idempotent, aim for eventual consistency on the roadmap, and let apologies be the write-ahead log when estimates get replayed
Let PMs teach you programming: the fastest way to learn why 'user story' is code for 'rewrite everything'
Am i the only one who have read io instead of 10 and thought this has something to do with files handling? Comment deleted
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