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Fire Your IT Boss
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Sep 13, 2008 07:26 PM
from the if-only dept.
from the if-only dept.
theodp writes "Instead of laying off techies who directly help users, Robert X. Cringely argues that the best place to cut IT organizations is at the top. One of the great problems in IT management, Cringely says, is that the big bosses typically haven't a clue what is happening, what needs to happen, and what it all should cost. He issues the following challenge: 'If you are managing an IT shop and can't write the code to render "hello world" in C, HTML, PHP, and pull "hello world" from a MySQL database using a perl script, then you are in the wrong job.' Even with help from Google, Cringely believes many technical managers would fail this test and should get the boot as a result — you can't manage what you don't understand."
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I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Insightful)
I think having the manager understand the technical nature of whats going on is certainly an asset.. but ultimately I don't know if it's a necessity.
Point is, managers manage people. You are there to code.. not them. The only technical details they need to do their job is: how long it will take, how many people can work on it efficiantly, what tasks are dependant on it, risks, and benifits.. and you are there to provide them with that info.
Managers are about the big picture, not the fine details. In fact.. a micro-managing manager can be a bad thing.
I think we've all been there... the guy who is directing the circus has no clue about whats involved in it's component parts and you wonder how he ever got the job...
When you really look at what he spends the day doing though.. you realize the majority of his job revolves around the non-technical things that you probably don't want to have anything to do with (timing, resource allocation, cost, etc..)
Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Insightful)
Except, I'm not there to provide them with that info. Not really. I'm there to provide them with "this is how long it will take me" or "this is how long I think it should take". That's not necessarily the same thing as how long it should take, what it should cost, etc.
In order to manage me and my fellow employees, as well as the time and money we are spending, they need to have an understanding external to us.
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Interesting)
... or experts they can trust. Some of the most pleasant managers I've had, didn't have a clue about the technical aspects of what I do, but they did trust me when I gave them a time/cost/resources estimate. Then they either gave me what i asked for in that estimate or asked what could be accomplished within more limited parameters. My co-workers and I would do everything we could to make good on that estimate, and the manager would do everything they could to keep non-task distractions (like upper management) out of our way. Those were wonderfully enjoyable jobs because i could just go and work, with a minimuim of haggling, looking over my shoulder, or politics.
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of the most pleasant managers I've had, didn't have a clue about the technical aspects of what I do, but they did trust me when I gave them a time/cost/resources estimate.
Sure, that can be nice when it is you, but what about the less-than-competent/ethical cow-orker who can endlessly blow smoke up the technically clueless manager's ass?
A good manager has a good bullshit detector, which means technical competence is necessary.
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Interesting)
Amen!
I have seen more than one company that was effectively dysfunct in the way you describe.
In one particularly disturbing example the CTO is a former taxi-driver(!), I kid you not. He apparently participated in some tech gigs before joining the company but nothing that would turn him into a competent manager by any metric. The boss praises him for his "communication skills" which pretty much translates to the constant ass-blowing (CTO towards CEO) that you mentioned. Other than that everybody knows that he's clueless, it's even obvious when you only look at the figures since he never meets a deadline (well, maybe once a year) and budgets frequently expand like supernovas. Needless to say the company has completely lost all its momentum because this guy accumulated a team of ass-blowers around him that, just like him, can't get shit done but knows how to disguise it in creamy communications...
The scary part is that in our economy this setup *can* work, depending on your business-model. The aforementioned company is making millions in revenue with a ridiculously crappy product, simply because the competition is equally bad or worse.
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Insightful)
The very best manager you could ever have manages the people above him, not the people below him.
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Insightful)
Agree agree agree. I've had a good time working at utterly incompetent workplaces because the bosses 2-3 levels up from me shielded me from the idiocy above me. They deserved their perks, believe me.
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. As someone who has moved up through the IT organization and manages a large group, I spend FAR more time managing my boss and his boss than my staff. They get their assignments, with enough authority to get them done and responsibility to get them done. My job is to secure the necessary resources, provide a sounding-board, review technical decisions they make and run LOTS of interference to keep my boss out of their hair so they can actually get the work done.
I've had very little turnover in my years of managing, and have had people who seek jobs for companies I go to work for to work for me again. Guess I'm doing something right. :-)
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't agree more.
I'm a bottom-level IT manager. They call me a "team lead," which is code for "you're a manager but we're not giving you any more money."
I was on vacation for 12 days at the end of August. When I got back, I got two reactions:
1. From my boss - "I'm so glad you're back, I tried to get the guys to do a build and apparently just managed to confuse them."
2. From the most senior developer - "I'm so glad you're back, I didn't realize how much you filter out. It was one of the worst weeks I've had in a long time."
My job is to run interference between my boss and my team, and to translate between boss-speak and developer-speak. Occasionally I get to write some code, too. If there's something that looks fun and is small I selfishly grab it for myself. God knows I don't have time to do anything big.
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Funny)
It's a trap! You don't want to work for a boss that reads /.! They'll know you're jagging off on here calling them a jerk all day!
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Insightful)
(timing, resource allocation, cost, etc..)
Yes, but the people who actually see those resources and money at work have a *much* better better idea where they actually go. A manager who has a history lower down will make better choices, instead of just throwing money at something, they might throw it at the project, but aim it a bit better.
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not so much about slacking as it is about incompetence. Someone might work really hard but produce far worse results than someone who works half as hard, but has talent and pride.
A manager without the skills is likely to keep the former and lay off the latter.
And what does it help if your project completes on time, if it's seriously b0rken? Then there will be months of band-aiding, followed by a declaration that it was a success, no matter how horrible it was. And you end up with five times as many people in the support organization (and managers to oversee them) because you didn't understand enough of the gritty details to ensure that the project got done right. And as a CTO, you'll get a bonus, while the lower level people who have to support the steaming pile of technology get the shaft. Repeatedly, to Ravel's Bolero.
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Insightful)
The managers decide whether it's complete or not. Systems work by fiat -- they're declared working, and thus they work on paper, no matter how b0rken they may be.
Remember, support comes out of a different manager's budget.
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Interesting)
This simply doesn't work with programmers.
Take a team with a couple of average programmers, one really excellent programmer, and an incompetent programmer who tries really hard all the time.
What does the manager see? He sees two average employees doing overage things. He sees the excellent programmer "goofing off" half the time, because he spends more time thinking than coding. And he sees the incompetent programmer putting in long hours and always working furiously.
What does the manager hear? He hears nothing from the excellent programmer. He hears a lot of moaning about long hours from the incompetent programmer. And he hears a lot of complaining from the average guys about how incompetent the incompetent guy is and a lot of praise for the excellent guy.
What does the manager think? Well, that depends on what he knows. If he knows programmers, then he'll recognize that the excellent guy's output is fantastic, that the incompetent guy's output per hour is extremely low and is causing havoc, and that the average guys are right to complain.
If he doesn't know programmers, he sees some guy who spends all his time goofing off, another guy who works really hard, and two average guys. The average guys complain about the hard worker and praise the lazy guy, thus showing that they are not to be trusted. Apparently they are jealous of the hard worker's success, and are trying to convince the management that they should be allowed to spend all of their time goofing off too. After enough time passes, the heaviest bonuses are awarded to the incompetent guy, and the excellent guy gets fired for goofing off.
It probably doesn't work with a lot of other jobs too, but programming is what I know and it's what we're talking about.
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Insightful)
This is so true and common!
But i tell you as soon as the smart programmer is fired. The average programmers who received all the insight and help from the smart programmer disappears as well (usually hence why there is all this praise).
As for the incompetent programmer he totally loses access to his "sugar daddy" and "yoda master" work colleague and in a manner of months if they cant find another good programmer to fill his shoes then the whole ship starts to sink :)
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Insightful)
By output do you mean lines of code? For many non-technical IT managers, that's how you measure output. Incompetent programmers can often put out ten lines of code that should require one.
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Insightful)
A manager who does not grasp at least the fundamentals of the job(s) that the people under him/her do may not believe or understand subordinates when they give estimates of time/manpower/risks/benefits/etc.
Someone who doesn't have a bit of knowledge of coding is more likely to say "yeah yeah, you can do that in half the time or I can hire this guy in India who says he can".
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Interesting)
While it's certainly helpful to have the management know how things down below work, as the organization or project grows larger this becomes less and less practical, down to downright impossible. The CEO of Ford knows what a carburetor is, but certainly can't identify the parts of one taken apart in front of him. That doesn't make him a bad CEO.
Each step you take up the management ladder, you lose skills and you gain skills. Every very rare now and then you will run across someone that started at the bottom and is now VP or something, and has a very detailed knowledge of how things worked way down at the bottom, ten years ago. Only does him a marginal bit of good now. More often the knowledge they value is of how the people interact and who is responsible for what. This is what makes a good manager - not knowing how you do your job, but knowing how you are important to the company, where you fit in, etc.
I repair computers. My manager tries to repair computers, but isn't very good at it, and I don't expect him to be. That's not his job, and I can't do his job any better than he can do mine. HIS manager knows how to USE a computer, but certainly not how to work on one. This is how it works.
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Insightful)
Just my opinion, but you are dead wrong. The CEO of a large company must know the basics about that company's main products. I would not expect the CEO of Ford to be able to understand all the finicky details about Ford cars. However I would expect him to be able to open up the hood of any Ford car coming off the assembly line and point out all the relevant parts and roughly what they're responsible for.
A CEO must rely on subordinates to handle details, but the CEO himself must know enough about his products to be able to make some independent checks and decisions.
Take this back into the computer world. Apple and Microsoft are great examples of successful computer companies led by people who, while not experts, know computing pretty well. Gates may not be the best programmer in the world but he certainly knows his stuff. Jobs may not be out there writing code but he understands the technologies to a much higher degree than the hypothetical scenario you describe with Ford. Now take a contrary example, say, Hewlett Packard. HP went way downhill under the management of Carly Fiorina, someone with a great deal of "management" experience but who, as far as I know, is not technically knowledgeable.
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I think that that is the problem we had. (Score:5, Insightful)
There have been a lot of comments about how your manager doesn't need to know the technical aspects of what you do.
Let's just extend that with your Ford analogy.
The CEO doesn't know what a carburetor is. ...
So he hires person A to handle that.
But person A does not know, either.
So person A hires person B to handle that.
But person B does not know, either.
So person B hires person C to handle that.
Eventually you end up with the situation where you have layers and layers of "middle management" that do nothing other than move reports around and attend meetings.
And that's why you're probably driving an import today.
And 100% agreement on HP and Carly. I have no respect for HP now. The person at the top is paid a LOT of money ... supposedly because she has a LOT of knowledge and expertise and skill. Arguing that knowledge is not needed ... well, people always disparage what they do not have.
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Re:I think that that is the problem we had. (Score:5, Interesting)
Except the CEO of Ford sure as hell knows what a carburetor is, how it works, and how to take it apart and put it back together. He's an aerospace engineer. We both had the same professor for Senior Aircraft Design in school (years apart, of course). I know he knows his engines. :)
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd like to see them go back to being run by a "car guy."
A 'car guy' is not necessarily good at running a business.
I guess it depends on what you mean by a "car guy". Running Ford is a very complex job - you have to make huge macro decisions years in advance of the end effect. For example, you have to decide all the details of all the cars you are producing today probably eighteen months or two years in advance. How many of each model to produce, design decisions for each car, etc. A "car guy" has a marginally better chance of creating an organization that will design a car that will be a "good car". The problem is that the CEO really has to delegate almost all of those decisions to the mid-level executives in the design and production groups. The CEO can work with other senior execs and the board of directors to say "next year, we will make a good profit if we produce X of model A, Y of model B and Z of model C and sell them at appropriate profit levels." Its up to others in the company to make sure that the cars are produced, that the dessigns are appealing and so on. For what Cringley is talking about the auto industry is really a terrible example. The macro factors are so huge compared to most smaller tech companies. Care are a better comparison for either large tech companies like IBM or for tech work in "non-tech" industries.
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Informative)
A 'car guy' is not necessarily good at running a business.
Henry Ford and Enzo Ferrari did pretty well at it. So did Ferdinand Porsche, Frederick Royce, Karl Benz, and Walter Bentley.
-jcr
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Insightful)
Management is a similar situation. The manager is there to make sure that if he wants to outsource part to India, that the product has clear delineations and interfaces so the work can be split up. A manager who learned these lessons in 1980 doing RPG is the same as a manager who learned these lessons from his old boss at IBM who learned them writing COBOL in 1971, who is the same as a manager who just helped Google launch a new BETA product. His architect will tell him how to split it up, but the manager will be the one deciding what the important choices are, getting the right questions in front of the right people, and helping those who know work towards the right solution.
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't RTFA (natch), but from the summary I would agree with you that this argument is wrong. The manager of some programmers does not need to be able to write "Hello World." I've had a very good manager that couldn't do that, but she was very good at keeping track of what impacted on what and keeping an eye on our progress. I do agree that the valuation of managers vs. those that actually do the work is often the wrong way round and cuts should follow accordingly. I often think the better way to consider a manager is as an assistant to those who do the actual work, taking care of the peripheral details of a project allowing the important people to do the actual work. But the reasoning in this article, along the lines of whether the manager can do the programmers job, is *not* the place to start.
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Informative)
I often think the better way to consider a manager is as an assistant to those who do the actual work, taking care of the peripheral details of a project allowing the important people to do the actual work.
Excellent point. My manager is an old COBOL & IMS programmer who can't write a word of SQL.
But... he knows what the difference is between OLTP and a Data Warehouse, knows that IO is slower than core, and is bright enough to have learned from us the difference between sorted and hashed indexes, and when to use them, and what happens when indexes get out of whack.
Thus, even though he can't do what his underlings do, he knows what's reasonable and not, and bravely defends us from User Stupidity and Programmer Incompetence.
When he retires, I'm going to cry.
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Insightful)
You are exactly right. I have worked with numerous execs who weren't very technical, but if they are doing their jobs well and respect my opinions then they are perfectly fine in their roles.
Years ago, at one particular job, I was the corporate network admin. My job was to maintain the network and to a lesser extent, help employees with computer problems. Anyhow, there was a time when the head of our marketing department had an issue that, by my rough estimation, I would be unable to resolve without an hours worth of work. When I told her this, she starting yelling and screaming at me, to which I basically told her to fuck off. She threatened to issue a complaint to the CIO since she had no authority over me. All I had to do was tell the CIO what had happened and he went over and chewed her out. It was a perfect example of two management types who both lacked the technical knowledge to assess the problem, yet one chose to berate me while the other chose to trust me.
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:5, Interesting)
I prefer a non-technical manager.
A technical manager often inserts himself as a buffer between me and the users. This makes it harder for me to determine what the users really want.
He also typically starts to solve the problem before I can, while solving it using his own ideas, which are typically not the ones I am used to. (Everybody seems to write programs their own way.)
The result is that by the time an assignment comes to me, it has already been "partially digested." It is not so clear what my program is supposed to do, but I am given rigid requirements about how it is supposed to do it. In the worst cases I am simply given a big pile of code and the instruction, "Finish this."
I much prefer to work for non-technical people. I can work with them to hammer out what the program is supposed to do, and then I am free to use the ideas I know best in order to do it. This allows me to work faster and more accurately.
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Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that (Score:4, Insightful)
Point is, managers manage people.
No, managers administer a business function.
Some managers called 'supervisors' or HR Directors do perform primarily functions in the management of some people. Most manager posts perform much broader functions, and dealing with the people hired to assist in performing a function of the business within their 'jurisdiction' is only part of the job.
For example, the manager of finance is responsible for manging the business finances. They had better know about financial concepts like what balance sheets are, how income statements are made, taxes, credit cards, etc, in high detail. Even if they have subordinates responsible for dealing with the direct work in dealing with these things. This is just the same as an IT manager knowing what programming languages are like and being able to understand high-level design documents, program flow chart, etc.
A facility manager would be responsible for everything that goes into maintaining a certain facility.
In a large enough business, even an IT-related business, there are managers who don't need to know about technology or details of coding.
But for a manager to be effective they must have appropriate knowledge of the domain they are managing.
An IT manager that manages coders directly needs to have knowledge of coding. Individual coders are not likely to be able to give good timelines for a project that needs timelines. Unless they are managers of their project, it's not their job or their ability to provide such estimate.
Adding up the times individual coders think is no good. The IT manager needs to have the knowledge, or needs to hire or delegate to someone to manage the coders and take all responsibilities who does have that knowledge and ability to work on getting a rough estimate.
IT managers will often be responsible for making purchase decisions; approving requests from departments for computers, or for software. An IT manager cannot make good decisions about what computer equipment to allow to be purchased on their IT budget without clear understanding of the equipment and what the usage will be.
It will be difficult for IT managers to allocate resources in a manner that will allow completion of projects if they lack sufficient understanding to know when a request is reasonable, when a request is already stripped down, or when a request is exhorbitant, and it's better to authorize only a cheaper alternative.
Also, IT managers will often be involved in setting policy for the use of technology business-wide. It will be difficult for them to set or approve reasonable usage and internal IT support policy if they do not understand the technology.
Moreover, it will be difficult for an IT manager to hire competent subordinates, rather than candidates who are good at bluffing their way through an interview.
A good IT manager should know enough to be able to quiz candidates and discuss technical issues with clear understanding.
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How it is (Score:5, Insightful)
As usual, Cringely is right. The fat floats to the top.
I'm an IT project manager. If one of my peeps bailed and I couldn't step right in and fill their spot and train their replacement myself I would consider myself a failure. It's all about the customer and if we fail to meet the customer's needs because of this everybody involved has failed.
I had this conversation recently: "Can you replace X?" Answer: "Of course. If I couldn't, we both need replacing."
I've got people both under and over me. I fully expect both the unders and the overs to be able to step in and catch the load if I step in front of a bus. I don't want to catch a bus, and I don't want my unders and overs to do so either. But I'm prepared for either event and you should be too because if you can't you're neither responsible nor capable of advancement and that's a sad place to be.
That said, most days my role is reduced to catering. I let my peeps do their gig and I get stuff out of their way. Only the newbs need direction and they get over it right away.
As soon as they're oriented:
I'm only an IT project manager until my bosses find someone better. My techs only work for me until I find someone better. That's the way it is and that's the way it should be.
Re:How it is (Score:5, Insightful)
I do like the Starship Troopers attitude though.
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Re:How it is (Score:5, Insightful)
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Writing hello world is not a manager job (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Writing hello world is not a manager job (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as the communication's right, a manager doen't need the technical skills.
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Re:Writing hello world is not a manager job (Score:5, Insightful)
No, often a manager also manages resources, makes decisions as to future projects and product directions, etc.
A certain amount of technical knowledge is required. Either that, or the manager has to be willing to listen to and trust those who are knowledgeable below them.
I've seen good managers who were technical and listened, good managers who were technical and didn't listen as often, and good managers who were nontechnical but knew who to get reliable information from. However, I've never seen a good technical manager who lacked the technical background *AND* didn't listen to underlings.
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I totally disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
I know we're all colored by our personal experiences - but, based on my own, I think the problem is exactly the opposite. A lot of IT managers think they are technically savvy, because they've managed to get some sort of certification at one point or another in their lives (or maybe they were rather knowledgeable at one point, years ago, but have not kept up simply because of the other demands that come with management). These types of people are the epitome of "know just enough to be dangerous". It then gets exacerbated because they often sell themselves to the rest of the organization as "IT savvy", and feel free to make technical decisions regarding project details when they really have no business doing so.
I think we need IT managers that are MANAGERS, not IT people. Those managers should then trust us to know how to do the detail work required for our jobs.
My own manager has been learning this lesson over the last several years, and as such my work situation has steadily improved. He is still the liason with the rest of the organization, but he usually sticks to the broad strokes and lets us underlings sweat the details.
Oh, great... (Score:5, Funny)
How much you wanna bet a bunch of CEOs are going to RTA and fire all the COMPETENT bosses and keep the PHB's?
Yeah... sigh. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's true. They pretty much all fail.
I had a job where my boss told me to go redo the website using whatever technology and features I thought I needed to make it excellent. He gave me two weeks time to do the first phase of moving the old content over to the new framework and coming up with some cool new ideas.
It was fun. About six days into the project, a manager came down from another branch had an interview with my boss, sat next to me while I explained the site.
The two of them had a little meeting and called me in. "We're pulling the plug."
"What? Why?"
"You're doing it wrong."
"What are you saying?"
"You should be using Dreamweaver. Everyone uses dreamweaver and you're doing hand-coding. What language was that again? PHP or ASP?"
"PHP and MySQL."
"Dreamweaver does that automatically."
Anyway the whole conversation went like that. I was told that I had to change into their idea of what a programmer was -- and that's the big problem. Managers have no idea what a web developer or programmer should be because their idea of the job typically is distorted. They rule based on FUD.
I left the company, obviously. If you can't manage your people, you won't have any.
Re:Yeah... sigh. (Score:4, Interesting)
This is not necessarily a bad argument. Forcing you to use an inferior tool because there is a standard everyone at the company has to use means anyone can pick up your work later. It decreases your ability to do the spectacular. But it increases your ability to be replaced if the worst happens.
And, I don't have much experience with Dreamweaver, or know exactly what you were querying from the DB, but some simple variables I can imagine being automated.
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Re:Yeah... sigh. (Score:4, Interesting)
Forcing you to change tools 6 days into a two-week project is a bad idea regardless.
From the employee's point of view, BOTH of those are bad things. The first means they'll be seen as a poorer performer, the second means they'll be more likely to be out on the street.
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A similar experience (Score:5, Interesting)
I once had a similar gig for a major newspaper. They had contracted the usual clueless newb to engineer their online presence. The app had a memory fault that crashed the server. They hired me to fix it so that it worked, and incidentally deny the original guy the pay for the contract. I found that a different method of memory allocation would eliminate the issues. Rather than telling my bosses about it, I called the original programmer and told him how to fix all three lines of code that were at fault. He revised it and it worked.
I lost my gig but I still feel good about it. Doing the right thing is not always in your immediate best interest. I'd feel bad about stealing the benefits from his work for three lousy lines of code.
The retarded newspaper editors - not so much. They haven't given up their horse-and-buggy-whip model of business. If they had kept me we would have fixed this issue by now. It's not too late to fix this but I no longer care about their welfare and they neither think I have the answer nor remember where to look for me to find their salvation. Such is the ebb and flow of business.
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I don't agree with this assessment. (Score:5, Insightful)
The article seems to more say that the IT manager needs to understand the underlings jobs and be able to describe the job. Not that the manager has to understand everything the underling must do to complete the job. The summary seems a little slanted.
The absolute best IT managers I've had were more than willing to state when they didn't understand the technical details. In the cases where they had to explain something in detail they did what a good manager would do; they'd ask the individual who DOES understand it better than they come and explain when that level of detail is needed. Those same IT managers not only understood enough of my job to outline what they'd like accomplished and stepped back to let me accomplish it in the most technically correct way possible, they shielded me from those above and outside the department so that I could do that job.
The last thing I want is to be managed by someone who thinks they are more an expert on the intricacies of what I'm working on. Either they are going to micromanage the individuals on their team or they aren't ever going to be satisfied with the work that is produced.
Maybe the poster would be happier if they were called IT Personnel Managers?
IT boss=human filter for stupidity @ higher levels (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you kidding me?
As long as my I.T. boss shields me from the dipshits and the politics at levels above themselves, I don't honestly care what they can or can't program.
They're worth more to me as a human filter than a fellow developer. Christ. Let me actually fix things - they can go off and interface.
What utter bollocks (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a different technical case: I know someone (let's call her Betty) who is an HR director. She's standing in for someone on maternity leave. The person she's standing in for (let's call her Helen) is "technically" superb, knows the nitty-gritty of HR really well. Helen is fully up to speed with every current aspect of HR. She could not only replace every member of her team, she's probably technically better than every individual member of her team.
But she's a crap manager. She micromanages everything, everything HR has been tasked with gets delivered late and in too much detail. Why? Because at director level, you don't need the micro-detail and you don't need the HR director's involvement in getting every step of every task done.
Betty hasn't done the job of HR for a decade, but she knows how to run a tight ship. After six months of having Helen out of the way, the HR staff are happier and more productive, the board is delighted with the stuff that HR is producing and Betty is doing very little indeed.
You don't get a dog and do the barking yourself, Mr Cringely.
As an IT manager... (Score:5, Insightful)
As an IT manager who has commit privileges to the core Python repository, and can write hello world in half a dozen languages, I'd like to chime in...
IT management almost certainly isn't about doing the work. That's why it's management and not technical work. Management is about helping other people do things.
For example, technical people are notorious for being not very good with people. Having someone helping them interface with the rest of the company, get funding, run interference for projects and decisions, all of this is very important to getting coding done, and does not require an ability to code or even an understanding of what is going on with the people doing the coding.
Having a die-hard techie in a management position may not be as valuable as having a die-hard manager there. Because if the manager just really wants to be doing the techie work, that's really where his passion is, then he probably is in the wrong job. Just as if the person in the techie job's passion lies elsewhere...
If you have someone in the organization, management or not, that isn't pulling their own weight, then definitely look at what you can do to remedy the situation. But whether a manager can write main() { printf("hello world\n"); } is almost certainly the wrong test to be using.
Would you fire the techie who can't come up with $50,000 in funding for new workstations and servers?
But, I guess the "re-purpose people who aren't pulling their weight" headline isn't as easy to get on slashdot as "fire your IT boss". :-)
Sean
I think you guys are missing the whole point... (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps it would be best illustrated by this 20 year old joke:
The Americans and the Japanese decided to engage in a competitive boat race.
The Americans and the Japanese decided to engage in a competitive boat race. Both teams practiced hard and long to reach their peak performance. On the big day the Japanese won by a mile.
The American team was discouraged by the loss. Morale sagged. Corporate management decided that the reason for the crushing defeat had to be found, so a consulting firm was hired to investigate the problem and recommend corrective action.
The consultant's finding: The Japanese team had eight people rowing and one person steering; the American team had one person rowing and eight people steering. After a year of study and millions spent analyzing the problem, the American team's management structure was completely reorganized. The new structure: four steering managers, three area steering managers, and a new performance review system for the person rowing the boat to provide work incentive.
The next year, the Japanese won by two miles!
Humiliated, the American corporation laid off the rower for poor performance and gave the managers a bonus for discovering the problem.
Re:Common Sense? (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, many of us have ended up working for those who are neither good programmers or good managers.
Parent