EppsNet

From a job posting for a Project Manager:

• 10 years of project management experience
• Full life cycle project management responsibility for at least 3 to 4 large projects (minimum 2 year duration, staff of at least 20 on each project, budget of at least $6 to $8 million per project).

I’m not a big fan of quantifying job requirements like that, because the numbers are just arbitrary.

For example, I can’t see how having managed 20 people makes you a better candidate than someone who’s only managed 18 or 19 people. Or even 17. Or 15.

Unfortunately, in the current job market, companies get a huge pile of résumés for every open job, and using criteria like these to cut the pile down to a manageable size simplifies the hiring process.

I know people — and probably you do as well — who meet these numeric criteria, and yet I would never hire them or work for them (again).

Because what doesn’t show up in the box score of their 2-year, 20-person, $8-million projects, is that the vast majority of the resource allocation was wasted and that the projects could have been brought in for maybe $500,000 by a project manager who had some idea about what he or she was doing.

Thus spoke The Programmer.