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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

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.
  - nostrademons 14y ago
    The real world is a really broad place. If your manager doesn't add any value, quit and be CEO. I've done that before and I'll do it again if I find that I'm in a position where being part of an organization subtracts more value than it adds. For the moment, though, I've found that my manager and the rest of my organization adds a bunch of value in very subtle ways that I wouldn't get if I were out in my own startup.

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.
- nostrademons 14y ago
  The real world is a really broad place. If your manager doesn't add any value, quit and be CEO. I've done that before and I'll do it again if I find that I'm in a position where being part of an organization subtracts more value than it adds. For the moment, though, I've found that my manager and the rest of my organization adds a bunch of value in very subtle ways that I wouldn't get if I were out in my own startup.