I don't work in the field as a manager -- being transgender, I'm not the kind of face they want at the company meetings. But, as an engineer... with decades of experience... I can tell you flat out: The majority of IT projects don't fail for technical reasons. They fail because of either poor communication, or poor project management skills. The first is everyone's fault. The second -- as an engineer, I can't do much about it.

I'll gently challenge you on this one. My years from 1996 to 2010 were spent strictly as an engineer. Lots of project management experience as a senior engineer towards the end of it, but no overall responsibility or final authority for managing people, budgets, or selling things above my pay grade. I handled the tech, and loved it.

Becoming a manager wasn't really a choice. I had to give up some of my beloved day-to-day geekery to things like budget fights, purchase reqs, hiring, firing and (ugh) essentially sales pitches to those holding the purse strings.

I hated it at first. I still hate parts of it with a passion. One thing I've been religiously doing is showing the engineers who work for me what information I need to pitch to get them what they need. Engineers can absolutely can do a lot to help get a project funded, and a good manager should ask them the right questions and let them know the criteria that non-geeks controlling the funding are looking at.

My engineers and I have spent several sessions talking about the vagaries of OpEX vs. CapEx... so we can make budget requests that are more likely to get approved. Like: how to package this whole thing as CapEx. If they know what I have to deal with to get them what they want, their initial requests are a lot easier to get through.

Re: transgender. If your company doesn't want you in meetings because of that, PM me. That's fucking stupid -- and where I work that kind of discrimination would get someone fired. If you let me know what you're looking for, if you're looking, I'll check our job postings.