The Joel on Software web log, is in my reading list, and the information that Joel Spolsky hands out is priceless…

This has been sitting in my in queue for a bit, but he works at dissecting the “Program Manager” title, and what it really means in todays business world.

Having a good program manager is one of the secret formulas to making really great software. And you probably don’t have one on your team, because most teams don’t.

Charles Simonyi, the brilliant programmer who co-invented WYSIWYG word processing, dated Martha Stewart, made a billion dollars off of Microsoft stock and went into space, first tried to solve the Mythical Man Month problem of organizing really big software teams by creating one super duper überprogrammer writing the top-level functions, while handing off the implementation of the lower-level functions to a team of grunt junior-programmers as needed. They called this position program manager. Simonyi is brilliant, but this idea, not so much. Nobody wanted to be a grunt junior programmer, I guess.

Read more at Joel’s web log…How to be a program manager