Introduction
At first sight, the terms gardening, programming and project management do not share much in common, except maybe for the fact that they all contain the letters "r" and "n". But that is not, what this essay is going to be about.
On closer inspection, all the three subjects involve time and structure. You have to plan and cultivate a garden, it is necessary for developers to plan their code and implement it, which costs time. And project management is basically about time and structure, and cutting down on staff, of course.
Now since project management might sound a bit boring for most young people and those who are not interested in organisational structures, both gardening and programming are a perfect way to prepare people for time and structure, i.e. for project management.
Their Similarities
Working in the garden implies tasks on various bases. On a weekly basis, weeds need to be pulled out. On a monthly basis, you may want to implant new flowers or trees and on a seasonal basis, you have to trim bushes. That means, you have regular meetings with your garden, you have deadlines (winter, summer, spring) and you have to make time-wise decisions. Just as in project management. In turn, while your garden suffers from a thunderstorm, as a project manager you might have to fire an employee because you are out of money. The same applies for programming. You have to update your code on a regular basis and sometimes, you get a hell of bug reports that are to be resolved.
Now let's get to some technical details. Even though not all gardeners might think this way, working in a garden essentially is like coding an object oriented language. You have objects (the plants, trees, tools and chemicals) and functions (like disarming the next door farmer's dog to save the chrysanthemum). In the case of an event (apples falling off the tree) you have got an event handler (add the neighbour's apple tree to the tree collection and apply the steal function on it) to solve the issues.
So, we see, already as a young person, you learn the essential things about both programming and project management by working in the garden.
Their Differences
In contrast to the programmer, both project manager and gardeners haven't got an undo function. But in turn, only the gardener's work has a positive effect on the worker's health. Again, the project manager potentially benefits from having an influence that both programmer and gardener might even not have dreamed of.
These issues are easily resolved anyway.
The undo function can be achieved by applying for a rhetorical training and using garden erasers (such as Touchdown Quattro) respectively. Unfortunately, it is not possible to directly have a positive impact on one's health from project managing or programming. But your staff car will do its best to get an airy compensation to the gardeners.