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This is why management needs to be technical. Otherwise you just end up with feature, feature, feature … death.
by osigurdson 3y ago
This is why management needs to be technical. Otherwise you just end up with feature, feature, feature … death.
- javajosh 3y agoTechnical and smart. Otherwise you end up with fix tech debt, fix tech debt, fix tech debt ...death.
- kaashif 3y agoI have also seen refactor, refactor, refactor, oh actually it's now no better than before. Whoops! It's like imaginary tech debt.
- javajosh 3y agoOr even worse than before - and the sad part is that no-one intended that to happen. All bespoke software is effectively an experiment that may fail. I've become a lot more wary of the "failure is good" mantra that SV is famous for - it's not good in a zero-sum game where labor is spent on stuff that gives no value, and refactoring for DX is definitely expensive but only possibly valuable.
- manvillej 3y agoThis is why management needs to be competent. Average CEO is 58 years old. Their first jobs were in the late 1980s. The economics and tactics around technology has been revolutionized a dozen times over in the last 4 decades. Now, maybe a few rare individuals have kept up, but most likely, they all rely on outdated strategies from out of touch MBA programs & buzz words. Its the same reason the market kills public technology companies' innovation and they rely on acquisition. Its like gunpowder has just been invented and leadership still wants large formations marching against each other. "what if we invested in medical training and add washing our hands so we can keep more people alive?" "nah, more guns and marching"
- no_wizard 3y agoFunnily enough, the best managers I've had are all in the late 40s - mid 50s that all did 20 years in the "trenches" and decided that management was the new path forward for them as they started to prefer people work to technical work. I think its work experience that matters most with management. You need folks who are people oriented but understand the job that the folks they manage are doing, and the challenges that come with it, both obvious and non obvious, and can communicate the importance of such work to the broader organization
- gopher_space 3y agoThere was an article posted here a month or so ago about how this guy was seeing a new class of worker emerge who both understood the necessity of absorbing knowledge from other domains and enjoyed the process. It reminded me of a dev I worked with who'd go on smoke breaks with the art department and then change data structures we'd been using forever.
- bumby 3y agoI was under the assumption this type of worker is what dominated before the industrial revolution constrained people to a small domain in a process. Some may call it artisan, dilettante, etc. Maybe the narrow-domain specialist was the anomaly and not the rule when we expand our lens across history.
- QuercusMax 3y agoI assume these "smoke breaks with the art department" involved more than just tobacco.... :D
- _jal 3y ago> The economics and tactics around technology has been revolutionized a dozen times over in the last 4 decades. Now, maybe a few rare individuals have kept up, but most likely, they all rely on outdated strategies from out of touch MBA programs & buzz words. Ah, the cult of youth. It is cute, when it isn't killing startups with rookie moves. It almost sounds like you think management is something like practicing law - like there's a set of rules that are revised on a schedule and they need CLE credits to keep them current.
- pydry 3y agoI find management only really ends up being a problem if they get too deeply involved in the contents of technical quality work. If they're limited to budget allocation it's actually better to have them involved. I almost always tell management that by default I'm spending, say, 30% of my time on technical quality and ask if they'd like to dial it up or down temporarily because of a holiday or a deadline they can. I will track this and show it to whomever asks (e.g. their boss and boss's boss might be interested if they've explicitly asked for 8 straight weeks of 0% work on quality).
- neon_electro 3y agoEven technical management can succumb to this. Agreed with most of the replies to your comment.