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My own commentary on this: I've been consulting the last few months, mostly brought in to coach CTO's. I'm (somewhat unwillingly) coming to the conclusion tha

My own commentary on this: I've been consulting the last few months, mostly brought in to coach CTO's. I'm (somewhat unwillingly) coming to the conclusion that nobody really feels like they know how to manage programmers. This leads to mismanagement, and nobody likes being mismanaged, (also it usually means you're being underpaid), so devs eventually wise up and get out. If you think about it, this is a natural extension of the "the best code is no code" ethos. The best situations I've seen are programmers-managing-programmers. I've been lucky in my career to work for multiple "engineer-turned-founder" types, and these have felt the most "aligned." I suspect that MBA programs should start including a CS component.

ScottBurson 7y ago
> I'm (somewhat unwillingly) coming to the conclusion that nobody really feels like they know how to manage programmers. That's because they don't. I've had good managers and bad ones, and all the good ones were, or had been, software engineers themselves. (Of course, some of the engineers were not so great as managers.) As I like to say, software engineering is about the management of complexity, and if you've never worked on a complex system, you don't understand how to do that.
scottLobster 7y ago
Sounds about right. A non-technical manager managing technical people is like the commander of a tank battalion not knowing how fast his tanks can go or what kind of ammunition they shoot, their fuel range, hell he probably doesn't even know how many people can fit in a single tank. But he thinks he's fit to manage such a unit because he's an expert in "general warfare", and he has all the "metrics". I've seen it in my own employment multiple times, my team's(admittedly good-hearted) managers come in and say "We'd like to do (list of 10 things). Now we know the software has limitations, and we don't have any money for feature enhancement, so feel free to tell us no on any of these." Us: "We can do 2 of those, maybe three if you can give us a couple of days to hack in one of the simpler requests" Managers: confused, questioning but begrudgingly accepting looks
- geomark 7y ago
  "A non-technical manager managing technical people" is Dilbert in real life and is so common it's practically a meme.

ScottBurson 7y ago

> I'm (somewhat unwillingly) coming to the conclusion that nobody really feels like they know how to manage programmers. That's because they don't. I've had good managers and bad ones, and all the good ones were, or had been, software engineers themselves. (Of course, some of the engineers were not so great as managers.) As I like to say, software engineering is about the management of complexity, and if you've never worked on a complex system, you don't understand how to do that.

scottLobster 7y ago

Sounds about right. A non-technical manager managing technical people is like the commander of a tank battalion not knowing how fast his tanks can go or what kind of ammunition they shoot, their fuel range, hell he probably doesn't even know how many people can fit in a single tank. But he thinks he's fit to manage such a unit because he's an expert in "general warfare", and he has all the "metrics". I've seen it in my own employment multiple times, my team's(admittedly good-hearted) managers come in and say "We'd like to do (list of 10 things). Now we know the software has limitations, and we don't have any money for feature enhancement, so feel free to tell us no on any of these." Us: "We can do 2 of those, maybe three if you can give us a couple of days to hack in one of the simpler requests" Managers: confused, questioning but begrudgingly accepting looks

geomark 7y ago
"A non-technical manager managing technical people" is Dilbert in real life and is so common it's practically a meme.