That's true, I generally think of good programmers as people who are able to take the larger goals and schedules into account and manage their own time appropriately, e.g. not design a huge academically perfect solution when the project needs to be done in a couple of days and a simple approach will meet the immediate need. That proejct management one is a reaction to the idea that a not-too-bright person with no technical background and a copy of Microsoft Project is somehow needed to keep projects on track. Most of the companies I've worked for seem determined to foist one of these people on me whenever we have a project that lasts longer than 10 minutes. I always end up doing the real project management (negotiating requirements, prioritizing features with users, tailoring technical approaches to meet the expected timeline, coordinating with the other programmers) myself, because these so-called project managers are not capable of doing it.

The thing that gets me is how they always want a big sequential list of every "task" so that they can enter it in Microsoft Project and tick things off. Lists like that create an artificial notion of accomplishment, i.e. finishing a small zero-risk task and checking it off looks more important than making progress on a large and risky task. I could go on bitching about the cult of Microsoft Project for pages, but I'm sure we've all been there.

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