3 ms·

Technical. The analogy I usually give is: would you take an mba and put them in charge of a platoon of marines? Why not? Because they don’t know which end th

Technical. The analogy I usually give is: would you take an mba and put them in charge of a platoon of marines? Why not? Because they don’t know which end the bullet comes out of and would be worse than useless. Ok, so then why put them in charge of a software company?

logicalmonster 4y ago
It's a funny Dilbert-esque visual to think about some cocky MBA who doesn't know about guns trying to guide a platoon of hard-nosed marines, but your analogy doesn't particularly work for me because of one key difference. Weapons are physical objects. This physicality of real-world objects is key IMO. Learning the basics of how physical objects work can be taught to almost anybody of even low intelligence. We prove this in times of war by ramping up training very quickly so basically anybody above room-temperature IQ can be quickly trained in various guns and equipment. Even if you assume that an MBA doesn't know what end of a mortar shoots out stuff on day 1, this is the kind of thing that anybody can learn. Software and Internet stuff is much harder for the layperson to learn because so much of this stuff is abstract. There's no real world equivalent for much of what we talk about and there's no Internet you can physically hold in your hand and easily create a mental model for. Personally speaking, I'd say that technical managers who have the capacity to code are ideal, but I'm fine with them as long as they understand the domain. If I'm talking about some potential issues with some HTTP request in a call, I don't care if a manager doesn't understand the nitty gritty details about HTTP headers, but they should understand what a request is and at least have a basic understanding of what is going on and how to explain it credibly to whoever they need to to avoid wasting my time on 13 separate meetings with different departments and stakes holders to explain the same issue over and over again.

logicalmonster 4y ago

It's a funny Dilbert-esque visual to think about some cocky MBA who doesn't know about guns trying to guide a platoon of hard-nosed marines, but your analogy doesn't particularly work for me because of one key difference. Weapons are physical objects. This physicality of real-world objects is key IMO. Learning the basics of how physical objects work can be taught to almost anybody of even low intelligence. We prove this in times of war by ramping up training very quickly so basically anybody above room-temperature IQ can be quickly trained in various guns and equipment. Even if you assume that an MBA doesn't know what end of a mortar shoots out stuff on day 1, this is the kind of thing that anybody can learn. Software and Internet stuff is much harder for the layperson to learn because so much of this stuff is abstract. There's no real world equivalent for much of what we talk about and there's no Internet you can physically hold in your hand and easily create a mental model for. Personally speaking, I'd say that technical managers who have the capacity to code are ideal, but I'm fine with them as long as they understand the domain. If I'm talking about some potential issues with some HTTP request in a call, I don't care if a manager doesn't understand the nitty gritty details about HTTP headers, but they should understand what a request is and at least have a basic understanding of what is going on and how to explain it credibly to whoever they need to to avoid wasting my time on 13 separate meetings with different departments and stakes holders to explain the same issue over and over again.