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Management is not programming, these are simply different skill sets. If you are asking senior managers to write college graduate programming solutions, you ar
by dollar 15y ago
Management is not programming, these are simply different skill sets. If you are asking senior managers to write college graduate programming solutions, you are being an asshole. If someone has moved up to people management, ask them people management questions.
- maslam 15y agoI agree management is not programming. But do you feel confident working for an engineering manager who does not understand what you are doing, even at a high level? Can you talk about design and cost with him or her? Look, managers who are not technical can still be great people managers. The first job of a people manager is to set the vision, and inspire you to do your best, none of which requires technical skills. I believe this was even supported by empirical research Google did a year or so ago (I can't find it right now). Still, to lead an engineering org, I believe managers have to understand technology, too, otherwise they will make uninformed decisions which will end up hurting the product. I'll give you an example: I interviewed someone a couple of days ago who had shipped large-scale real-time trading systems for a bank. He couldn't write a for loop. Fine. But I expected him to be able to do design an ETL pipeline. Couldn't do that either. How about basic functional design? Nope. At some point, I started questioning what value this person would add to the org.