3 ms·

One thing I noticed is that while there are quite a lot of posts on his site about "agile" and "methodology" I see basically nothing in the way of technical stu

One thing I noticed is that while there are quite a lot of posts on his site about "agile" and "methodology" I see basically nothing in the way of technical stuff (meaning working code) on his front page or in his tags list. Sets off my spidey sense for PHB.

scotch_drinker 17y ago
Really? Because a Scrumaster or an agile project manager who doesn't post code immediately is irrelevant? That's an odd conclusion to make. It seems clear to me after reading several of his posts that he manages people. While it is certainly true that there are a subset of managers who are also PHBs, I don't think you could highly correlate those who are and those who aren't by the number of posts they make about working code. If a person wrote nothing but posts about code and how it worked, no one would ever disparage them because they weren't a manager. Why is it that people disparage managers who don't write about code?
- ramanujan 17y ago
  > Why is it that people disparage managers who don't write about code? Because it increases the probability that they don't understand what they're managing. Look at Peter Norvig or Urs Hoelzle or Jeff Dean. They are still very, very technical despite managing many people. That earns them credibility among their troops. By contrast, this guy has written about 70 posts on Agile with almost zero code. I could find exactly three lines of code on his entire site under the F# tag, though I didn't look that hard. Bottom line is that he's unlikely to be someone who would earn an engineer's technical respect.
  - raganwald 17y ago
    I agree that he's unlikely to be someone who would earn an engineer's technical respect. By any chance are there other competencies a manager of technical projects ought to have?
    - ramanujan 17y ago
      Sure, but now we're talking about a programmer analog of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The first trait of a manager in high tech (whether professor or product manager) has to be technical competence. That trait is not usually sufficient to be a good manager. But I think it's necessary (you seem to disagree?)
      - petewarden 17y ago
        I would disagree. Many of the good managers I've worked under haven't had much coding experience. What they have had is the ability to trust the team to get them briefed on technical issues as they come up. I could see this being different in other environments (eg I can't imagine a research team manager not being an alpha geek) but for most corporate environments there are a lot of other skills I'd look for before technical competence. For example, one of my inspirations early in my career was an EPM (engineering project manager in the company's lingo) who had zero technical background. What she did have was an amazing ability to listen to everyone involved in the project, pick out the chains of dependencies, negotiate schedules with us, follow up relentlessly on any open questions and summarize what we'd just said better than we ever could. She made a massive difference, and the team's productivity dropped like a stone when someone less talented took over.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - scotch_drinker 17y ago
    He doesn't have to earn technical respect. If he's a good manager, he doesn't need to handle the technical side. Managing people is an entirely different skill set, one that has little to do with understanding the technologies and more to do with handling expectations, providing a buffer layer between the team and everyone else, etc. I'd much rather work for someone who handles those things very well but has nothing more than a high level understanding of the underlying technologies. Agile can be two things. It can be a development methodology and it can be a project management methodology. Being good at one does not imply being good at the other. I work with people who are geniuses at managing agile projects but that couldn't code their way out of a shoe box with 3 sides cut out. It's their ability to manage that is important, not their technical chops.

scotch_drinker 17y ago

Really? Because a Scrumaster or an agile project manager who doesn't post code immediately is irrelevant? That's an odd conclusion to make. It seems clear to me after reading several of his posts that he manages people. While it is certainly true that there are a subset of managers who are also PHBs, I don't think you could highly correlate those who are and those who aren't by the number of posts they make about working code. If a person wrote nothing but posts about code and how it worked, no one would ever disparage them because they weren't a manager. Why is it that people disparage managers who don't write about code?

ramanujan 17y ago
> Why is it that people disparage managers who don't write about code? Because it increases the probability that they don't understand what they're managing. Look at Peter Norvig or Urs Hoelzle or Jeff Dean. They are still very, very technical despite managing many people. That earns them credibility among their troops. By contrast, this guy has written about 70 posts on Agile with almost zero code. I could find exactly three lines of code on his entire site under the F# tag, though I didn't look that hard. Bottom line is that he's unlikely to be someone who would earn an engineer's technical respect.
- raganwald 17y ago
  I agree that he's unlikely to be someone who would earn an engineer's technical respect. By any chance are there other competencies a manager of technical projects ought to have?
  - ramanujan 17y ago
    Sure, but now we're talking about a programmer analog of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The first trait of a manager in high tech (whether professor or product manager) has to be technical competence. That trait is not usually sufficient to be a good manager. But I think it's necessary (you seem to disagree?)
    - petewarden 17y ago
      I would disagree. Many of the good managers I've worked under haven't had much coding experience. What they have had is the ability to trust the team to get them briefed on technical issues as they come up. I could see this being different in other environments (eg I can't imagine a research team manager not being an alpha geek) but for most corporate environments there are a lot of other skills I'd look for before technical competence. For example, one of my inspirations early in my career was an EPM (engineering project manager in the company's lingo) who had zero technical background. What she did have was an amazing ability to listen to everyone involved in the project, pick out the chains of dependencies, negotiate schedules with us, follow up relentlessly on any open questions and summarize what we'd just said better than we ever could. She made a massive difference, and the team's productivity dropped like a stone when someone less talented took over.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- scotch_drinker 17y ago
  He doesn't have to earn technical respect. If he's a good manager, he doesn't need to handle the technical side. Managing people is an entirely different skill set, one that has little to do with understanding the technologies and more to do with handling expectations, providing a buffer layer between the team and everyone else, etc. I'd much rather work for someone who handles those things very well but has nothing more than a high level understanding of the underlying technologies. Agile can be two things. It can be a development methodology and it can be a project management methodology. Being good at one does not imply being good at the other. I work with people who are geniuses at managing agile projects but that couldn't code their way out of a shoe box with 3 sides cut out. It's their ability to manage that is important, not their technical chops.