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This is factually not true. Developers can make big mistakes to bring entire companies down with them. Of course it depends on the definition of "mistake". Howe

This is factually not true. Developers can make big mistakes to bring entire companies down with them. Of course it depends on the definition of "mistake". However I can claim that a single defect caused by a developer can cost the company money and downtime, if nothing else a bad user experience. Managers don't generate defects. Developers do. Not to mention that a lot of the times it's much harder to reverse an engineering decision vs a managerial one. Most outages are caused by developers and IT, not managers. This perception that there is higher risk as a manager is false. As a developer I make multiple decisions daily, interpret vague requirements, make judgement calls, request new technologies etc. My manager understands about 20% of the decisions I make. Here is the kicker since I work in DevOps, with a super heavy emphasis on the Dev side. 70% of my decisions have wide ranging effect, much wider than my manager's eight person team. Finally note that no one really talks about 10x Managers, but people talk about 10x Developers. Why is that? Managers are glorified cheerleaders. Most managers are average, their value is vague but they are controlled by managers so its an endless loop till you hit the worker layer that get things done.

jedberg 6y ago
You sound like someone who has never been a manager or has no idea what a manager does. Yes, you're right that defects are made by developers. But you'd be hard pressed to find an example of a software defect that destroyed a company. Even if you as a DevOps engineer cause your company to be down for a day, it probably would have little effect on your company's bottom line. I was in charge of Reliability for Netflix. Our whole site was down for Christmas Day one year. No one was fired, and it barely affected anything. That was a pretty major defect. However, the way that management handled that outage had a huge effect on the company surviving that incident. Making sure we focused on the right problems to solve to prevent it from happening again. Creating entire new groups of engineers and then hiring them to solve specific problems of moving traffic between regions. So yeah, management is really important, and a good manager is definitely more effective than a single engineer. And management decisions can destroy a company, but I doubt you can find even one example of a single engineer's decision that took down a company.
- 100011_100001 6y ago
  I was a Sr Manager for about 4 years, two different "teams", one IT based, one QA based. Regardless, perhaps we need to define the word "Manager", mainly because your example said: > Creating entire new groups of engineers and then hiring them to solve specific problems of moving traffic between regions. Albeit admirable, like heck yeah that was a great outcome, it's not a manager decision. Most likely it was a VP or Sr Director decision. Perhaps a manager brought it up as an idea. So if we are talking about Sr Director's+ then yes, their decisions can absolutely bring down a business. Granted I am not familiar with Netflix's org chart so perhaps it works differently, from some basic reading it looks like Netflix follows a decentralized command of sorts. My beef with the original poster was the implication of risk. Both managers and devs have risk with their decisions. It's not just a manager thing. In the end, when Netflix went down where did the mistake come from? A manager or an architecture decision? Probably it was both.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    > In the end, when Netflix went down where did the mistake come from? A manager or an architecture decision? Probably it was both. In that particular case it was an engineer making a mistake, but my point was that it wasn't anywhere close to a fatal mistake. But more importantly, when a team had repeated technical failures, it was usually the manager who suffered the consequences. Especially if their failures were causing problems with other teams. The manager had the higher risk job because they were blamed for their team's failures. Therefore they had to be compensated to account for that risk to their job. It's the same reason CEOs get huge golden parachutes. Because their job is constantly at risk for not only their decisions but the decisions of everyone below them. So they get compensated for that risk.

jedberg 6y ago

You sound like someone who has never been a manager or has no idea what a manager does. Yes, you're right that defects are made by developers. But you'd be hard pressed to find an example of a software defect that destroyed a company. Even if you as a DevOps engineer cause your company to be down for a day, it probably would have little effect on your company's bottom line. I was in charge of Reliability for Netflix. Our whole site was down for Christmas Day one year. No one was fired, and it barely affected anything. That was a pretty major defect. However, the way that management handled that outage had a huge effect on the company surviving that incident. Making sure we focused on the right problems to solve to prevent it from happening again. Creating entire new groups of engineers and then hiring them to solve specific problems of moving traffic between regions. So yeah, management is really important, and a good manager is definitely more effective than a single engineer. And management decisions can destroy a company, but I doubt you can find even one example of a single engineer's decision that took down a company.

100011_100001 6y ago
I was a Sr Manager for about 4 years, two different "teams", one IT based, one QA based. Regardless, perhaps we need to define the word "Manager", mainly because your example said: > Creating entire new groups of engineers and then hiring them to solve specific problems of moving traffic between regions. Albeit admirable, like heck yeah that was a great outcome, it's not a manager decision. Most likely it was a VP or Sr Director decision. Perhaps a manager brought it up as an idea. So if we are talking about Sr Director's+ then yes, their decisions can absolutely bring down a business. Granted I am not familiar with Netflix's org chart so perhaps it works differently, from some basic reading it looks like Netflix follows a decentralized command of sorts. My beef with the original poster was the implication of risk. Both managers and devs have risk with their decisions. It's not just a manager thing. In the end, when Netflix went down where did the mistake come from? A manager or an architecture decision? Probably it was both.
- jedberg 6y ago
  > In the end, when Netflix went down where did the mistake come from? A manager or an architecture decision? Probably it was both. In that particular case it was an engineer making a mistake, but my point was that it wasn't anywhere close to a fatal mistake. But more importantly, when a team had repeated technical failures, it was usually the manager who suffered the consequences. Especially if their failures were causing problems with other teams. The manager had the higher risk job because they were blamed for their team's failures. Therefore they had to be compensated to account for that risk to their job. It's the same reason CEOs get huge golden parachutes. Because their job is constantly at risk for not only their decisions but the decisions of everyone below them. So they get compensated for that risk.