Popfly Management 
June 22nd, 2007
The Popfly project over at Microsoft looks pretty interesting if not just a cheap rip off of Yahoo! Pipes.
I just wanted to comment not on the application itself but an interesting thing that I noticed when looking at the list of people on the team - all of whom I am sure are very smart and skilled people. But here is the list of titles of the team members.
Group Program Manager, Program Manager, Developer, Developer, Program Manager, Program Manager, Engineering Manager, Test Developer, Developer, Product Manager, Developer, Program Manager, Program Manager, Product Unit Manager, Developer.
This can be summed up nicely in a simple graph.
Coming from a small company with something more like a 10 to 1 ratio of developers to managers I can’t help but feel somewhat bewildered! It just makes it even more amazing that large software companies don’t just crumble under the immense weight of the bureaucratic bloat.
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This entry was posted on Friday, June 22nd, 2007 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Web, AJAX, Business, popfly. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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June 22nd, 2007 at 3:43 pm
AIUI, “Program Manager” at MS is a developer aspiring to be a manager.
June 22nd, 2007 at 7:27 pm
Oh they do.. but its more like the steady decline of Rome.
June 23rd, 2007 at 2:01 am
I work for the Popfly team and I can tell you that our PMs check in more code than most devs I know. The basic confusion stems from the fact that a Microsoft ‘Program Manager’ is not a ‘manager’ as in other companies.
Aaron Brethorst from our team explained what each person does here http://www.brethorsting.com/uidesign/2007/05/i_am_the_token_startup_guy.html .
June 25th, 2007 at 2:33 pm
Thanks for the clarification Sriram!