I think you took offense because you interpreted my "project management" statement to be in scare quotes, where that was certainly not my intention - I literally just put them in quotes to highlight that I was quoting from your previous comment.

I certainly didn't mean to denigrate the job of project management. But I do agree with the other response - project management is just about ensuring a job is done on time/budget by tracking and managing a complex set of dependencies. I will say, at least in my experience, that really great official software project managers (I mean that was their job title) are worth their weight in gold, but they happen to be quite rare (again, emphasis on "in my experience"). Too often I worked with project managers whose thought their role was scheduling meetings and constantly asking all the engineers if the Jira board was up to date. But I think this because, when done correctly, the project management role is a challenging one that takes an unusual combination of attention to detail, communication skills, and ability to stay motivated on what can feel like boring tasks in the moment.

There are also “certifications” for AWS. I have six of them. They prove nothing as far as competence in an of themselves.

In the grand scheme of things, project management is about making sure projects are done on time, on budget and meets requirements.

It’s about managing dependencies, from a software development methodology, it’s creating a directed acyclic graph but with people instead of computers.

It’s also dealing with managing stakeholders, contributors, blockers, budgets, scheduling meetings, keeping the higher up informed, etc.

If you put a gun to my head, I can be a competent project manager. As a “staff” software architect half of my job managing cloud projects as a tech lead with the other half being more of a solution architect when we first sign a customer and designing an implementation plan with work streams and epics.

Usually I end up splitting the project management part up with a real project manager.

It’s not because of a lack of competence. It’s bandwidth.

But just like you can’t be a good tech lead if you don’t have some level of competence technically, you have to be decent at project management.

He could be clearer about what he does. He did say "Last year a recruiter reached out to me about a work from home job writing enterprise APIs." He doesn't mention going from writing APIs to operations management. Which seems to be where the confusion is coming from.

Though that is my understanding of how you make a big career change. Do your current job in a company that does what you want to do. Then change roles rather than jump to the role you want straight. Kind of beat the chicken and egg problem, of needing experience to get a job and can't get experience without a job. A job that is adjacent to the one you want is "second hand" experience.