The trouble with project managers

As an engineer, I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with project managers. On one hand, they’ve historically been the first (and most difficult) roadblock to me making the “right” changes to a system. On the other hand, they’ve typically been there to provide valuable insight that guides and shapes the systems I’ve worked on. For a while I wondered what life would be like without a project manager. I would be free to run at the things I thought were most valuable and implement them correctly while making my own time-to-market considerations. I wouldn’t have to spend countless hours in meetings discussing how I planned on implementing something and why it was the right thing to do to someone who didn’t fully understand what I was saying and mostly heard me asking for more time and more resources for less features. It sounded ideal.