David's Blague

The title "Project Manager" brings to mind an interaction with rms several years back. I was working on a "Content Management System" for a mutual acquaintance, and he asked me (seeming innocent):

"What are you working on?"

"A Content Management System." Simple enough.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, it's a system that manages content." I hadn't known Richard long at the time.

"That's like saying you're 'doing something with stuff.' It doesn't make any sense." Richard had a very good point, but I was still stuck. "What kind of content?"

"Mostly news articles, I guess."

"What are you doing with them?" he continued.

"Uhhh... publishing them to a website?"

"So you're writing a piece of software to publish articles? Why don't you call it an 'article publishing tool'?"

Using the title Project Manager is like saying I'm somebody who does stuff with things. I've spent a while trying to come up with a better alternative, and last night while I was putting the kids to bed, it was stuck in my brain for some reason.

What I do, is schedule. It doesn't sound glamorous, and much of it isn't. I write meeting agendas and send email and set up conference calls. I am tasked with guessing when it's going to be done, for some arbitrary values of "it" and "done". Most of all, I try to figure out the sometimes complex interdependencies between tasks and personalities.

What I schedule, is software. I don't know if scheduling a tank or a road or a rocket launch is really the same. Project Management Professionals [sic] treat them as similar problems, but I don't ever run out of steel or tar or hydrogen fuel, and so far I have never run out of bits, either.

I am a Software Scheduler. Since that job title still sounds like I'm someone who predicts the future and bends the space-time continuum, I hope to make this into an occasional series about how software gets scheduled.

Labels: programming, project management, scheduling, software