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Speaking as a developer I have to say the arrogance in this post is very disturbing. It reeks of someone who has no idea what they're talking about and can't un

Speaking as a developer I have to say the arrogance in this post is very disturbing. It reeks of someone who has no idea what they're talking about and can't understand the challenges people other than developers face. To think that managers are people who aren't as smart as you are, or are people who couldn't hack it as a developer is ridiculous and naive and arrogant. If your job is that shitty, and you're that smart and good, quit and find a better job.

bad_user 14y ago
And in fact the amount of shit that corporate developers are protected from is phenomenal. Getting shit out of the way of developers is the job of these managers. Now of course, some companies are better or worse than others, some managers are better or worse than others and so on. Personally I don't see myself a manager because I lack the social skills. In some days I barely remember to do minor things like sending out an email to my team at the end of the day or ask about the status of some roadblock.
- codeonfire 14y ago
  Developers are supposed to be grateful that managers protect them from shit from even dumber and insane managers above them? Nope. Why not just fire those insane managers slinging shit everwhere.
  - sokoloff 14y ago
    It's not that black and white. Ofttimes, what looks like meaningless corporate bullshit to a developer looks like valuable fertilizer to some other part of the organization, or to a regulatory body, or to something else that makes the company go. "looks like" phrasing was intentional here. I was a damned good developer back in the day, and am working on being a good manager (of managers at this point). There is an insane amount of red tape that sprouts up over time in any large assembly of people. Some of it has some positive purpose somewhere; some of it has no evident purpose. The best managers seek to protect their teams from unnecessary BS, but that doesn't necessarily mean eradicating it from the company. Shielding can be just as effective locally, at a tiny fraction of the cost.
    - codeonfire 14y ago
      Maybe we are talking about two different things. There's no qualms with stupid requirements, red tape, or regulations. The bullshit that I am talking about are the ethical lapses, the lying, the backstabbing, the disrespect, and the threats. There's no situation where that is legitimately valuable to some other part of the org. Anyone out there who thinks this is necessary or just part of the game needs to do an ethics check.
joelrunyon 14y ago
> If your job is that shitty, and you're that smart and good, quit and find a better job. That's the crux. If you really are that good, it shouldn't be too hard to leverage your skills somewhere better.
codeonfire 14y ago
Nope. No way. I'm a developer who has worked with a lot of managers on group projects in many different business classes. I have had all sorts of problems in group projects because by and large the managers all want to do the project during work hours while I am coding and testing as fast as possible so I can get home by 8pm. So, I'm going to go ahead and say bullshit to "the challenges people other than developers face." Maybe you can explain the challenges? I can imagine the difficulty in two manager trying to out-bullshit each other. This does not constitute an inherent difficulty in the job, but is a difficulty in living with themselves. If managers are shitty to each other, its not because of the job description, its because they are shitty to other people.
- nostrademons 14y ago
  I'm not a manager, I'm an engineer, but I'll speak up for the managers... The challenge managers have to face is balancing competing priorities. If you're a manager, you have customers/users that you need to please to keep the money rolling in. You have an executive who often has very strong opinions about how to please those users. You have employees that each have their own career goals and interests, which may not necessarily be aligned with yours. You have cross-functional peers who you frequently need to rely on for favors, and yet often speak a totally different language from you. And you somehow have to make all of the above groups happy, or at least not totally pissed off at you, to keep the organization functioning. I dunno what your job description is like, but mine (as a senior SWE at Google) is "Figure out how to make users happy". If you don't face similar ambiguities in your job description, it's because there's a manager somewhere up the org chart who did all the messy work of listening to what everybody else wanted and somehow harmonized it all into something halfway buildable. If you have a spec you're following, there was somebody out there who wrote it. If you're getting paid, it means somebody out there sold the product, and that usually requires listening to all the customers out there and figuring out what they want in common. None of these tasks do themselves.
  - codeonfire 14y ago
    That would be great except hat is not he real world. In the real world managers provide no value. Many are bold enough to admit to me that from the start they planned their careers around doing as little real work as possible and are focused only on ladder climbing and getting head count under them. My job description is wide open, I do all phases from conceiving of a project, to selling it to internal users, to coding and testing, to deploying and getting feedback. It's essentially intrapreneurship. I have never met a dev manager that understands software well enough to even begin to help in these regards. The ones that actually tried to organize development simply tried to dumb down the work to something they could understand like reports. As for the org knowing what they want, they want head count and exposure. I I could code these things I would be CEO.
ConceptJunkie 14y ago
The parent might be arrogant, but he also happens to be right. A lot of managers are simply incompetent and not that smart. In my experience, it's usually _not_ the line managers but the people above them. I've left several jobs, but almost always wasn't because of my immediate manager.

bad_user 14y ago

And in fact the amount of shit that corporate developers are protected from is phenomenal. Getting shit out of the way of developers is the job of these managers. Now of course, some companies are better or worse than others, some managers are better or worse than others and so on. Personally I don't see myself a manager because I lack the social skills. In some days I barely remember to do minor things like sending out an email to my team at the end of the day or ask about the status of some roadblock.

codeonfire 14y ago
Developers are supposed to be grateful that managers protect them from shit from even dumber and insane managers above them? Nope. Why not just fire those insane managers slinging shit everwhere.
- sokoloff 14y ago
  It's not that black and white. Ofttimes, what looks like meaningless corporate bullshit to a developer looks like valuable fertilizer to some other part of the organization, or to a regulatory body, or to something else that makes the company go. "looks like" phrasing was intentional here. I was a damned good developer back in the day, and am working on being a good manager (of managers at this point). There is an insane amount of red tape that sprouts up over time in any large assembly of people. Some of it has some positive purpose somewhere; some of it has no evident purpose. The best managers seek to protect their teams from unnecessary BS, but that doesn't necessarily mean eradicating it from the company. Shielding can be just as effective locally, at a tiny fraction of the cost.
  - codeonfire 14y ago
    Maybe we are talking about two different things. There's no qualms with stupid requirements, red tape, or regulations. The bullshit that I am talking about are the ethical lapses, the lying, the backstabbing, the disrespect, and the threats. There's no situation where that is legitimately valuable to some other part of the org. Anyone out there who thinks this is necessary or just part of the game needs to do an ethics check.

joelrunyon 14y ago

> If your job is that shitty, and you're that smart and good, quit and find a better job. That's the crux. If you really are that good, it shouldn't be too hard to leverage your skills somewhere better.

codeonfire 14y ago

Nope. No way. I'm a developer who has worked with a lot of managers on group projects in many different business classes. I have had all sorts of problems in group projects because by and large the managers all want to do the project during work hours while I am coding and testing as fast as possible so I can get home by 8pm. So, I'm going to go ahead and say bullshit to "the challenges people other than developers face." Maybe you can explain the challenges? I can imagine the difficulty in two manager trying to out-bullshit each other. This does not constitute an inherent difficulty in the job, but is a difficulty in living with themselves. If managers are shitty to each other, its not because of the job description, its because they are shitty to other people.

nostrademons 14y ago
I'm not a manager, I'm an engineer, but I'll speak up for the managers... The challenge managers have to face is balancing competing priorities. If you're a manager, you have customers/users that you need to please to keep the money rolling in. You have an executive who often has very strong opinions about how to please those users. You have employees that each have their own career goals and interests, which may not necessarily be aligned with yours. You have cross-functional peers who you frequently need to rely on for favors, and yet often speak a totally different language from you. And you somehow have to make all of the above groups happy, or at least not totally pissed off at you, to keep the organization functioning. I dunno what your job description is like, but mine (as a senior SWE at Google) is "Figure out how to make users happy". If you don't face similar ambiguities in your job description, it's because there's a manager somewhere up the org chart who did all the messy work of listening to what everybody else wanted and somehow harmonized it all into something halfway buildable. If you have a spec you're following, there was somebody out there who wrote it. If you're getting paid, it means somebody out there sold the product, and that usually requires listening to all the customers out there and figuring out what they want in common. None of these tasks do themselves.
- codeonfire 14y ago
  That would be great except hat is not he real world. In the real world managers provide no value. Many are bold enough to admit to me that from the start they planned their careers around doing as little real work as possible and are focused only on ladder climbing and getting head count under them. My job description is wide open, I do all phases from conceiving of a project, to selling it to internal users, to coding and testing, to deploying and getting feedback. It's essentially intrapreneurship. I have never met a dev manager that understands software well enough to even begin to help in these regards. The ones that actually tried to organize development simply tried to dumb down the work to something they could understand like reports. As for the org knowing what they want, they want head count and exposure. I I could code these things I would be CEO.

ConceptJunkie 14y ago

The parent might be arrogant, but he also happens to be right. A lot of managers are simply incompetent and not that smart. In my experience, it's usually _not_ the line managers but the people above them. I've left several jobs, but almost always wasn't because of my immediate manager.