In terms of PM - I think many PMs (the good ones at least) should actually be dev leads. So maybe the right way of saying this is that we should fold them into the dev org as leads where they have the skills to do that.

The rest we should release.

Didn't Ballmer's reorganisation mean that there was a triad of developer, project manager and tester working together? That would mean one project manager for each developer wouldn't it?

Or am I wrong? Has that changed?

We don't have one PM/test per dev, no. My team is currently something like 8 devs, 3 testers, 3 PMs. There was an internal shift to change the test/dev ratio to something like 2/3 or 1/3 (I can't remember exactly) instead of matching it. I don't know of a team in my division that has a 1:1 for PM or test to dev.

Thanks for the info. Very informative, considering I work in a tiny company and we have 3 developers, with 1 (me) working on the bit that people actually use daily (the entire GUI bit on multiple platforms).

I used to work in a larger team in a different company but we only had 1 PM who frustrated us all, sadly. How do they balance 3 PMs? Do they argue between themselves?

I can only speak for my team obviously but our product has quite a bit of complexity from both within (features) and without (partner contracts). There is enough work that the PMs typically own different aspects of the project and don't have many chances to step on each other's toes.

My org merged dev and test. I'd say the jury's still out on the wisdom of that move.

That actually may happen a lot more with this "unified engineering" push from Satya.

The triads are at a higher level. Once you get down to individual contributors there is typically a high ratio of Dev and QA to PM (maybe 1-2 PMs per team of 15), and usually a couple more Devs than QA. I'm not sure how widely those ratios are enforced or how much it varies from team to team.