I see a lot of rants about Project Managers (PMs). As someone who might work as that in the future, what are the some do's and don'ts for that role?

respond to inquiries from your team in a reasonable amount of time. Also, try to include a lead developer in scheduling with reasonable deadlines.

Make sure you FULLY understand the technologies that you will be supervising.

a big amount of PMs didn't ever worked as developer or has little experience with.
the key for me is to know the technologies my team is working with, and every assle they have to deal with to solve a problem or develop a feature.
if I'm not aware of that I have to put the customer on wait for a quote or time estimate, or maybe give them a wider time estimate.
I have a background of Dev, and currently I still do it, along side to manage Team, PM and sysadmin decisions.

@jirehstudios Isn't fully understanding everything you use a dream even for developers? I remember the whining when SO went down the other day :)

My advice:
In my opinion you'd do well to let go of pride. Focus on what needs solving and let the developers who are expert on how to solve things do their part. Rather pretend to know less than you do than pretending to know more than you do.

I guess it depends on the culture of the company/organization, country etc. But in my experience people work better when they are happy rather than miserable so don't be an asshole just to show your power. Most devs I know work good with a lot of freedom in combination with responsibility, but one or two will just get stressed out and might do better with a shorter leash so they don't feel overwhelmed.

Get to know your team. Is there anyone who fail silently? Check in on them more often.

@Elkstorm Using an example, fully understanding PHP doesn't mean how to code it. But you should fully understand its basic ecosystem. A PM that knows what a LAMP stack is, the basic ways of optimizing it, and the basic pros and cons of it among other things, will better understand and appreciate the developer's point of view.

Don't be a dick

@jirehstudios On that we can agree :) I wouldn't want to work with a totally clueless manager.

Take your time to research the technologies your company works with, as many have stated. My current PM never took the time to do that. She is overloaded with clients and will never find the time now. So instead of spending ~8 hours a day coding, I spend 1/4 of that time deciphering the clients' requests she copied and pasted from emails and helping her to write emails back describing development processes she doesn't understand and can't articulate.

Needless to say I have avidly been looking for a new job. My company was too lazy and cheap to train the PM properly and now everyone pays for it.

Alright, thanks for your feedback! I'm thinking I'd start as a developer for a couple of years to gather the knowledge of various languages, techniques and methods, as well as what benefits or hinders projects. I'm thinking that it all comes down to working WITH your team and not as two seperate instances, which means listening and planning together, as some of you already have stated

just listen to what those poor guys say