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From: Arved Sandstrom on 1 Oct 2009 20:00 Eric Sosman wrote: [ SNIP ] > I eventually got myself out of the management game, feeling that I > wasn't all that good at it and that there were aspects of it that I > actively disliked. I especially hated doing annual performance reviews; > who was I to be playing Judge, Jury, and Executioner with these people? > And on one occasion there was a person I really should have fired, but > I lacked the guts. Luckily for me he accepted an offer elsewhere and > left under his own power, but I knew I'd lucked out and might not luck > out the next time. So I jumped off the management ladder -- I hadn't > gotten high enough to suffer injury from the fall -- and have been much > happier since, thank you. But I *don't* subscribe to the no-thought > Dilbertian dismissal of managers as inherently defective (a position > more extreme than the one you've actually taken, I confess, but using > words like "idiots" to describe people who face circumstances of which > you wot not tends to make me rant a bit). [ SNIP ] IMHO an IT organization works best if it has two parallel chains of management/supervision just like the military does. In the military, of course, you've got the enlisted chain, which reaches all the way up to the top, and this is where the technical expertise mostly resides. And also in the military, you've got the parallel commissioned chain - officers - who lead and "manage". At every level of the management food-chain you have a technical advisor - the enlisted person. A lot of IT organizations are layered exactly opposite - they have a bottom layer, somewhat stratified, of technical people, and on top of that is the management layer. There may be a little bit of mixing in between, but that general picture holds true. So what ends up happening is, the junior technical folks talk up to the senior technical folks, who in turn talk up to the junior managers, who in turn talk up to the senior managers. The bigger and/or more formal the organization is, the worse this situation is. There's no mystery here as to why things don't work well. I've encountered few IT managers over my career who had any real software development experience. I don't even pretend to know what their academic credentials have been; I just know they haven't been programmers. So these people start out as junior managers, and generally with little background have to present the condensed input of the entire technical team under them to _their_ manager, who usually started out the same way...as a non-programmer. No wonder things don't translate all too well. It's not that the managers themselves - as people - are defective. It's the system that's defective. Next time you get a chance look at your organization or one that you have dealings with. If the structure is one of top-level non-technical managers supervising intermediate-level non-technical managers, who in turn supervise bottom-level non-technical managers, who in turn supervise technical people, you've got a problem. AHS
From: EJP on 1 Oct 2009 21:43 Arved Sandstrom wrote: > IMHO an IT organization works best if it has two parallel chains of > management/supervision just like the military does. It does but more accurately these consist of the Staff chain where the technical expertise is and the field command chain where the moral leadership is. You can get to be a staff general without ever having had a field command. This of course is resented by the field command chain but they know they need the system. The bizarre stratification in industry where senior techs report to junior managers only seems to happen in Anglo-Saxon countries. In Germany and Italy you can get onto the board by virtue of being an engineer.
From: Eric Sosman on 1 Oct 2009 23:46 Arved Sandstrom wrote: > [...] > There's no mystery here as to why things don't work well. I've > encountered few IT managers over my career who had any real software > development experience. I don't even pretend to know what their academic > credentials have been; I just know they haven't been programmers. [...] The Peter Principle takes good programmers and promotes them until they're bad managers. (It also turns good doctors into bad department heads, good teachers into bad deans, and bad actors into worse governors ...) The issues that programmers and managers struggle with are different. Yes, they need to be able to communicate about technical topics in technical jargon, but the programmer does not participate in the fights over budget allocations and the manager does not spend his days ferreting out race conditions. The skill sets are not the same, not at all, not even when the two work toward a common goal. In a long-ago job it suddenly occurred to me that I was under the care of a good manager. What caused this revelation? Was it his skill with the debugger? No. His ability to squeeze half a microsecond out of an inner loop? No. His beautifully clear, idiomatic source code? No. The realization hit me when I was chatting idly with someone else whose project was stalled yet again while the ordering process for a piece of equipment ground ponderously along -- and it suddenly dawned on me that for upwards of a year I had *never* had to wait for new gear to arrive: It had somehow always been budgeted for, ordered in advance, allocated lab space, and so on. My manager would seem to do nothing, yet somehow the equipment always showed up when it was needed and I got to move smoothly from one project to the next without down-time. I claim that my then manager was doing a superb job of managing the resources, and I further claim that his activities had nothing whatsoever to do with programming, and I still further claim that neither I nor the most talented programmer in our company was equipped by training, experience, or skill set to accomplish what my manager did. (Alas, not all managers are as good as that one. But then, few programmers are as good as they think they are, so it sort of evens out.) There is no a priori reason to think that a good programmer can be a good manager, nor that a good manager must be a good programmer. -- Eric Sosman esosman(a)ieee-dot-org.invalid
From: Ken T. on 2 Oct 2009 02:27 On Wed, 30 Sep 2009 23:27:30 -0400, Eric Sosman wrote: > When the hirer has an immediate, short-term need to get > something done with that specific combination of goodies. If the task > at hand is "Omigosh, the one person in the company who maintained the > Brueghel Flugel application has just been drowned in a butt of Malmsey, [Snip long and very interesting discussion about hiring and such] Thanks for the tips Eric! -- Ken T. I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me. -- John Cleese
From: Ken T. on 2 Oct 2009 02:39
On Thu, 01 Oct 2009 23:42:45 +0100, Tom Anderson wrote: > I certainly didn't mean to imply that managers are a special breed of > imbecile. I think most developers are idiots too. I pretty much agree with this statement, but it takes a special breed of idiot to make his/her living by telling other people what to do. BTW, the guy I talked to was a technical guy. He just wanted me to have experience with exactly the portions of the API that he was using in his project. Close was no where near good enough. That said, it may be that in this market people can get exactly what they want. Maybe enough of us are unemployed (or underemployed as in my case) that they can just ask for something and expect to get it. I've noticed the money that is being talked about these days seems like it is a decade out of date. -- Ken T. Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life, secondly to liberty, thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can. -- Samuel Adams |