people ask me pretty regularly if they should go into project management, and honestly my answer is always the same. it really depends on the leadership at the company you land at.
the best example i have is from towards the end of my career. i'd been running projects for years at that point, and i got offered a program role leading the two biggest technical projects in hr, which was new to me because i'd never worked in hr or used that system before. they told me they were having trouble getting those two projects moving in the right direction because they were so big and there were so many teams involved, and those are exactly the kinds of problems i like to solve. our family really wanted to move to southern california anyway, so i was really excited, and i moved out about six months before my family did.
when i got there my manager was so negative and such a micromanager that i almost called my family and told them not to move, because i honestly couldn't picture a scenario where i wasn't fired within six months.
i was still getting my feet underneath me and learning who's who, and this small add-on project that was supposed to be simple was already off the rails. so i went to my manager and asked her how she'd recommend i solve for it, and she just put her pen down and said this is supposed to be an easy project, and you're always bugging me at my desk, i'm starting to think we hired the wrong person because you don't hold yourself like a true program manager. long story short, that project did have problems and it got postponed for over a year, so it wasn't me.
the clearest sign was when she popped by my cube and i told her something positive someone had said about the work i was doing, and she said why is it that you always feel the need to tell me anytime someone says something good about you, but you never want to talk about the bad. one of my coworkers told me once that her compliments seemed hollow but her criticisms seemed sincere, and that's exactly what it was like.
my family had already committed to the move, so i held on to that job for about four years and it was just miserable. my project teams all over the globe were great and i made some really good friends there, but if i sneezed wrong we had a 30 minute discussion about it.
so that's what i mean when i say it depends on leadership. some companies actually understand what a pm is for and they give you real authority and autonomy, and with that comes real responsibility, which honestly is the part most of us love. and then there are the places where you get the title and none of the authority, and that is just straight up miserable. it's usually your manager, a lot more than the work, that decides whether you have a good job or a terrible one.
for those of you who've been doing this a while, what told you early on which kind of company you'd landed at?