4 ms·

One of my long standing beefs with C-suites and their MBAs and whatever meat factory grinds them out is the continued lack of comprehension of basic software an

One of my long standing beefs with C-suites and their MBAs and whatever meat factory grinds them out is the continued lack of comprehension of basic software and IT management. Back in the early 2000s, this could be saliently characterized by the exuberance many CEOs of companies bragged about how IT-ignorant they were. I saw the "my secretary prints out my emails" written proudly in print many a time in the CEO worship magazines like Fortune and the like. Every decade of continued IT penetration and performance benefits in business are continuing the principle: the health of your business is strongly tied to its IT health. BUT MY COMPANIES JUST STAMPS WIDGETS. Ok, look. MBAs long ago accepted that every business, regardless of what it does, needs two things: accounting and finance. So every MBA gets a decent education on those. Well, hate to tell you, MBAs need to know the fundamentals of IT. Basically, C-suites not understanding productivity measures in IT are hard is stupid not only because it is a basic aspect of IT management, but its a bit more disturbing than that: YOU CAN'T MEASURE MANAGER PRODUCTIVITY EITHER. How does traditional MBA measure middle managers and those types of orgs? That is rife with all the problems of measuring developers, not the least of it being the "juke the stats" universal phenomenon. That's why the most important single indicator of manager ability is: headcount. Headcount headcount headcount. The second is size of budget: bigger bigger bigger. Of course everyone that has working in companies knows the hilarity of what that produces: bloated orgs, pointless spending to use up a budget otherwise it gets cut, building empires, etc. The essence of developer that C-suites need to understand is that they are not factory workers: they are in fact MANAGERs. They just don't manage people, they manage virtual employees/subordinates (software). Go ahead, ask any software dev in an org what they do. Generally, somewhere in there is a bunch of acronyms and the fact that they ... wait for it ... MANAGE those acronyms. Krazam's microservices is a perfect example of this. What is that long diatribe essentially about? MANAGING all those services. That gets to another major undercurrent of IT. Managers want to place IT employees in the "worker bee" category. They don't want IT workers to be managers, and entitled to the great benefits according the management class. The long running IT salary advantage in the US, and the constant ebb and flow between management and IT "working" to push that down is a major social undercurrent here.

6510 2y ago
I like to compare it to illiteracy.
- OJFord 2y ago
  Yeah, that's quite common? 'computer literate' etc.? It's even quite dated as a term because it's so uncontroversial and accepted.
  - 6510 2y ago
    Right but I think that use to refer to using applications. Developing them is much more like real illiteracy. You can look at a bug tracker but the todo list might as well be in Chinese.
vundercind 2y ago
> YOU CAN'T MEASURE MANAGER PRODUCTIVITY EITHER. This is so much the case that on a Freakonomics episode I caught on NPR the other day about economists attempting to prove whether the Peter Principle is true (TL;DR probably yes, and likely more so than you’d even guess—but also this is all very hard so maybe don’t take it too seriously) it seemed that this is something so difficult that they barely even try to do it and when they do the measurements are so narrowly-focused and come with so many caveats that one hesitates to call them useful. Like best case you manage to find that you can measure one of several plausible performance indicators and if you’ve picked the exact right kind of job where worker productivity can kinda-meaningfully be measured (it often cannot) then maybe you can conclude some things with a large enough dataset, but then connecting that to any particular behavior on the part of the managers is another big hurdle to overcome before you can try to, say, develop effective scientifically-sound training, and at that point you’ve likely wandered into “just give up, this is too messy” territory. [edit] and this: > That gets to another major undercurrent of IT. Managers want to place IT employees in the "worker bee" category. They don't want IT workers to be managers, and entitled to the great benefits according the management class. The long running IT salary advantage in the US, and the constant ebb and flow between management and IT "working" to push that down is a major social undercurrent here. Nail. Head. Managers of developers act piss-pants afraid of us properly joining the (socially speaking) upper-middle (cf Fussell) or professional class, which the MBA set are busy trying to eliminate everywhere else (lawyers, doctors, college professors) so they’re the last ones standing. This shit is why micromanagement PM frameworks and packing us into loud visually-messy sardine can open offices is so popular. Dropping that stuff would be table-stakes for our moving up the social status ladder. Adopting it pushes us way down the pecking order.

6510 2y ago

I like to compare it to illiteracy.

OJFord 2y ago
Yeah, that's quite common? 'computer literate' etc.? It's even quite dated as a term because it's so uncontroversial and accepted.
- 6510 2y ago
  Right but I think that use to refer to using applications. Developing them is much more like real illiteracy. You can look at a bug tracker but the todo list might as well be in Chinese.

vundercind 2y ago

> YOU CAN'T MEASURE MANAGER PRODUCTIVITY EITHER. This is so much the case that on a Freakonomics episode I caught on NPR the other day about economists attempting to prove whether the Peter Principle is true (TL;DR probably yes, and likely more so than you’d even guess—but also this is all very hard so maybe don’t take it too seriously) it seemed that this is something so difficult that they barely even try to do it and when they do the measurements are so narrowly-focused and come with so many caveats that one hesitates to call them useful. Like best case you manage to find that you can measure one of several plausible performance indicators and if you’ve picked the exact right kind of job where worker productivity can kinda-meaningfully be measured (it often cannot) then maybe you can conclude some things with a large enough dataset, but then connecting that to any particular behavior on the part of the managers is another big hurdle to overcome before you can try to, say, develop effective scientifically-sound training, and at that point you’ve likely wandered into “just give up, this is too messy” territory. [edit] and this: > That gets to another major undercurrent of IT. Managers want to place IT employees in the "worker bee" category. They don't want IT workers to be managers, and entitled to the great benefits according the management class. The long running IT salary advantage in the US, and the constant ebb and flow between management and IT "working" to push that down is a major social undercurrent here. Nail. Head. Managers of developers act piss-pants afraid of us properly joining the (socially speaking) upper-middle (cf Fussell) or professional class, which the MBA set are busy trying to eliminate everywhere else (lawyers, doctors, college professors) so they’re the last ones standing. This shit is why micromanagement PM frameworks and packing us into loud visually-messy sardine can open offices is so popular. Dropping that stuff would be table-stakes for our moving up the social status ladder. Adopting it pushes us way down the pecking order.