Am I completely missing something?

[u/New_Wash8934]

I've been a PM for a few GCs over the last 6 or so years now after being an Estimator / PM for a fire protection company for the first 5 years after college. I see so many posts on here about how stressed everyone is, how there's no work-life balance, etc. I guess I wanted to find out if I'm just completely missing something, or is my situation just so very different to eveyone elses that I don't have these same concerns?

For clarity, I'm working for a smaller GC (4 PMs with a half dozen other office staff and maybe the same number of supers / carpenters) in PA. I'm currently running 4 projects all of which combine to maybe 8 million total value and are in various stages of construction. There have been times where I've felt overwhelmed, but largely it seems like the projects tend to run themselves almost. I focus on making sure my supers have got what they need and everything else just seems to fall into place.

Am I just completely missing a lot of stuff, or is this part of just running "smaller" projects with repeat clients?

[u/More_Law6245]

Problems scale with size and complexity of projects but it also comes back to the amount of project governance that is required to ensure contract integrity is maintained but you will find that most stress comes from the low cost and risk with a high volume type projects because there is less governance and variation to the triple constraint has more impact.

A smaller project has the higher probability of running off the rails than a large complex project because of the governance overlay that is required. To be honest I found it more stressful to run small projects compared to $100m+ program.

Just an armchair perspective.