8 ms·

How do you think this is ever going to change if programmers, some of the most sought after professionals in this economy, keep taking orders from these people?

by rickmb 15y ago

How do you think this is ever going to change if programmers, some of the most sought after professionals in this economy, keep taking orders from these people? For a team with mature, responsible and professional developers, it shouldn't be such a big deal to have a non-technical manager anyway. Most management responsibilities have nothing to do with technical matters. A manager should serve the developers, not order them around. A good manager, technical background or not, will be glad to get out of the way of a good team. I myself am a manager with a technical background. I consider myself no more than mediocre as a manager. There are a lot of non-technical managers out there who could probably do a way better job managing , but they would have to be told by the programmers what they need from them. But most programmers don't speak up. Most programmers don't say no. Most programmers don't explain why interruptions are so costly, let alone outright refuse to let that ruin their work. Most programmers have never read pg's essay about maker time and manager time. A professional chef will walk out if his boss told him to burn every steak to a crisp, but most programmers will grumble a bit, get on with it and then (but only if they really care) bitch about it online. This despite the fact that chefs have way more to lose given the job market. With most programmers being so unprofessional, assigning a grade school teacher doesn't even sound like such a far fetched idea... It's not exclusively a senior management problem. Senior management doesn't know there is a problem unless they happen to have a technical background themselves, which is an unrealistic expectation, given that software is everywhere these days. It is first and foremost our problem. We're the ones that know what is wrong and how to fix it. We are the professionals this business relies on. Only assigning managers with a technical background isn't going to work anyway, because there are not enough of them to go round. As a programmer, you have to be a bit of masochist to put the peter principle to the test on yourself while your technical knowledge is still relevant, and people are willing to pay you good money just to code.

nirvana 15y ago
"With most programmers being so unprofessional, assigning a grade school teacher doesn't even sound like such a far fetched idea..." Wow! FWIW, I am one who is genetically incapable of keeping his mouth shut. If something's stupid or sucks, I'll say so. If people disagree with me and have arguments to back up their disagreements I'll listen. I have zero tolerance for responses along the lines of "because I said so, just do it." In my experience, a lot of programmers are like this as well. There came a time when the CEO of the company where gradeschool teachers were the management was replaced... by someone who also knew nothing about development. She recognized all the problems with the product (which was being mismanaged) and I told her that the problem was management, how we'd tried to have reasonable practices, including repeated requests for a plan that we could stick to, and that the grade school teachers were in over their head. I recommend that they be put into a position to have input on the educational aspects of the product, but that engineering should be run by someone who understood engineering. She told me that there would be no management changes, and she wanted me-- given that I was the most senior engineer-- to give her a plan for fixing things. (Seemingly oblivious to the fact that I'd just given her the solution.) I told her I'd been working on a plan and that I'd give it to her in 30 minutes. Went back to my office, wrote a resignation letter, named the fact that management made product progress impossible as the reason, and handed it to her. She said "That was fast" and I said, it's not what you're expecting, and walked out of the office, never to return. (I had been on the bubble already, and would have resigned earlier if the events that led to her becoming the new CEO hadn't occurred.) I cannot think of anything more compelling than explaining why things were broken, making suggestions for how to fix it, those being rejected out of hand, and then emphasizing the point with a resignation. I was committed enough that I gave up my job, without a replacement lined up. I don't know what more could have possibly underlined the seriousness of my position to her. Do you think she learned anything by this? No management changes were made, but apparently I did have some impact: The gradeschool teachers got even more hysterical and neurotic after I left, starting to accuse employees of paranoid conspiracies, etc. More and more people started resigning. The company failed not long after this. It is my considered impression that most people who are clueless are not interested in thinking about things-- when something unusual happens, like my resignation-- they just assume that its a reflection on me, rather than the situation. Everyone working on the product knew the problem, there wasn't debate among us, but management was too ignorant to even understand that the problem was management. The grade school teachers saw everything thru that lens-- they thought "their kids" were screwing around or wasting time, or wanting to do thing their own way rather than the way they needed to be done, and so they believed it was just irresponsibility that was causing the product problems. Meanwhile we were getting whiplash as they changed their opinions and positions and demands for what the product would do on a weekly basis. One thing I've noticed in bad managers that is pretty consistent-- they tend to change their mind about what the product should do, and then think that their subordinates are slacking when the product doesn't do the new thing. Even thought they may have wasted 6 months under a prior plan, they don't account for that-- all those six months are credited towards the new plan, and why wasn't it done already if you had 6 months? In the case of the grade school teachers, this product was a magical wonderland where anything they could dream up could be created-- and any time their thoughts changed the product could change without any cost at all, cause to them it was totally plastic. So anytime someone said that these changes would take time and have impact on other things, they thought the person was just being lazy and didn't want to make the changes. I remember once, there was a rumor that a VC firm associated with Bill Gates might be investing, and so my boss came in and told me we had to replace all of our linux based infrastructure (file server, email server, web server, etc) with Windows. "If bill gate finds out we're using linux we won't get funded!" I told him it was silly as things were working fine... so he brought in a "windows consultant" who told us we needed to buy 4 new top of the line servers to replace our one spare developer PC that was doing all the work currently, cause "You can't run a web server and and FTP server on the same machine!" Naturally the grade school teacher believed his over priced consultant- who was telling him what he wanted to hear- over his engineer. How was he to know any different? He's a grade school teacher. (He now has a significant position at Microsoft, which I think is hilarious....)
- rickmb 15y ago
  Although I can completely identify with your story (been there, done that, more than once), you have to realize that you haven't given her a solution, nor have you taken responsibility (except for your own career, which sometimes is of course the best thing to do). You've only told her management is the problem, that "engineering should be run by someone who understood engineering", not that the engineers can run the engineering part themselves. "We need better managers" is just as non-constructive as "we need more programmers to make the deadline". You cannot open a can of competent managers just like you cannot open a can of competent programmers and everything will be alright. You want to convince management you can do a better job? Show them. Sure, it means sticking your neck out. It means you may fail. Hell, it means you may get fired for even trying, instead of being allowed the dignity of quitting yourself. But that is commitment. That is putting your ass on the line because you believe in what you stand for. You want good engineering practices? Start applying them. You want a realistic plan? Make one. (One caveat: incumbent managers may turn out not be your main impediment. Some coworkers who will gladly join you in bitching sessions will run for cover if you actually try to change things from the inside. You know, the guys that stayed when you quit and continued to take it up the ass without protest.) It's only when clueless management insists on telling you how to do your job and prevents you from doing it right is when you run out of options. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that is what you personally should have done. Most of the mismanagement you're describing is just pure mismanagement, nothing to do with being technical or not. But just doing it is the best chance of actually changing things, rather than to wait for a that rare manager-with-technical-background to come and rescue you. Or of course start your own company. In which case, unless you prefer to go solo, you may at some point find yourself dealing with the same issue from the other end.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - cookiecaper 15y ago
    I think that you are taking it a bit too far here. If the new CEO couldn't pick up after he had laid all of that out, it was most likely hopeless. After years and years of banging my head against walls, I have learned that sometimes people are just not capable of processing what you're talking about, and that the best course of action is to leave these people totally alone and try again in 2-3 years and see what has changed. Sure, he could have tried to lead an internal revolution or whatever, but the reality is that after he hurt the wrong person's feelings on the third day he would have been fired anyway. He could have spent a few days laying out a very formal reiteration of everything he had just told the new CEO, but after she discarded the executive summary so flippantly, what would have been the point?
yason 15y ago
* Most management responsibilities have nothing to do with technical matters. A manager should serve the developers, not order them around.* Exactly. That's what good management does: insulate the programmers from as much nonsense that is possible. A good manager has some grasp of the field so that he can block at least the most outrageous feature requests from the devs or at least delay asking about them until a weekly meeting or something. If the devs have problem, the manager will drive the issues through the cogs and clogs of the organization and bureaucracy instead of using valuable developer time to track those issues. An anecdote: I have had travelling arranged by a competent office manager and a company-wide travel reservation and approval system. Guess which saved so much time from everyone, sending an email to the office manager "I need to fly to X next Tuesday, my boss on Cc: with this" and afterwards dropping a stack of receipts back to her for filing reimbursements, or a dozen people trying to figure out what's the best way through the travel system without sacrificing too much work time on that and still ending up scanning individual receipts for uploading to the system.
- hga 15y ago
  The problem is, of course, what you identify as "[a] good manager has some grasp of the field so that he can block...." A good manager has to have a minimum of understanding and/or a maximum of trust in some of his subordinates. Far too many in our field have either.
- hga 15y ago
  The problem is, of course, what you identify as "[a] good manager has some grasp of the field so that he can block...." A good manager has to have a minimum of understanding and/or a maximum of trust in some of his subordinates. Far too many in our field have either.

nirvana 15y ago
He's passing judgement on a situation he wasn't present at, based purely on his projections onto it. Essentially everything he said is false, but he's got an axe to grind and he's grinding it. I'm not needed for it, and there's not much point in debating him on events he has no knowledge of. In fact, this is part of the reason I think engineering managers should understand engineering. Its not that one who doesn't can't be a good manager, its just that by understanding engineering they understand the consequences of the decisions they make. If a manager simply trusted his subordinates, then knowing engineering might not be necessary. But the bad managers generally don't. They think that engineering explanations that go over their head are BSing because the engineer is lazy or doesn't want to do the work, or is padding the estimate or whatever. The tend to project onto engineers all the fault, and blame them for "not speaking up" (when in fact they did speak up but were ignored) or whatever rationalization is convenient at the time. They project this worldview onto actions to explain them, when in reality, what they're trying to "explain" has been already explained to them-- only in engineering terms. I think bad managers also often have a superiority complex where they see a class divide between "management" and "workers". And they think that they job is to keep workers working, as if we're orcs in Warcraft who have to be beaten with a stick or we'll lie down and take a snooze. Now I'm on the other side of the table. I am the manager. I've had challenges with employees, and they are always interesting and different.... but none of them are lazy, and none of them were making shit up to get out of work.
- rickmb 15y ago
  I'm not passing judgement on you personally. In fact, I twice emphasized that I'm not saying that is what you should have done. You may have had a Very Bad Manager. There may have been nothing you could have done about it, other than walk away. I totally accept that. But you write: they (managers) see a class divide between "management" and "workers" When what I see in your words is you (the programmer at the time) seeing (and reinforcing through your actions) a class divide between management and workers. You blame the bad managers for a behavioral pattern that you were just a as much a part of. At least that's what I read in your words. And that's what I see in many other programmers. They act like children with zero responsibility, and then complain about being treated as such by evil pointy haired bosses. It's a two way street. And given that we, the engineers, are the ones who know how it should be done, we have a considerable responsibility in changing it.