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Non-Technical Managers in a Technical Company?
Futurepower(R) asks: "Before he was hired, Steve Jobs of Apple told John
Sculley he was a sugar-water salesman, and perhaps should have listened to his own words.
Under
Chairman and CEO Louis V. Gerstner, Jr, IBM did well, but was that only
because the world needs a global computer service company? Was IBM technically
advanced during his tenure? In your experience, can managers with little technical knowledge successfully
run a technically-oriented company?" What qualities would such a manager need to keep a tech company healthy?
Has a clear vision for where the company is going.
Surrounds his/herself with solid advisors within the company to indicate what is and is not possible
Listens
Rewards good ideas and performance
Discourages sycophancy
Is compensate for real success, not juggling the books or tricking Wall Street into sending up the stock price
Is able to accept constructive criticism
Knows how to properly delegate and referee
Makes the hard decisions before they become even more painful
I don't think there should be a requirement that the CEO knows thouroughly the product line of the company, a broad understanding is is essential, but knowing how to successfully run a business is key. I get pretty irked when a manager says something like, "Well, why can't we just build a database in Access? It's easy to do, I do it all the time!", when the product is actually going to be rather large and require something more robust. It's a pretty good indication there's an oversimplificator on the loose and trouble is around the bend.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
In my experience, even managers with tech experience can't always run the show. There's certainly more to it then domain expertise, common sense being one of the most important.
Managing a company isn't a matter of engineering.
Steve Jobs is doing a pretty good job at keeping Apple above and beyond the norm of the computer industry.
A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. -- FDR
Probably know the field he is getting in to as well as an efficient crap_detector.
An ex-colleague of mine had the gall to ask his PM in a team meeting for an extra couple of days to write a SELECT query just because the query was returning not just a handful of records, but millions!
The PM, to the apparent delight of all, agreed with out a second thought.
Rapid Nirvana
The problems with most companies that have non-technical managers isn't that they can't manage a technical company. The frustration that people have with non-technical managers is that they make business decisions and don't seem to appreciate the technical end of things. I'm referring to a non-technical manager perhaps cutting a project that may not be all that profitable but has a lot of technical value. And often to business people, R&D has little value in the present and can be cut.
At least my frustration with non-technical people is they seem to make business decisions on what can make a profit now and ignore technical merit of future potential profit.
If the manager is managing technology, he should understand it.
If, however, the manager is managing technologists, he has more need of understanding the people than the technology.
Whatever he manages, the manager needs to recognize his own limitations, and seek advice for things outside his expertise.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
I think a non-technical CEO can be incredibly powerfull in building a customer orientated focus.
I know at my company, Cisco Systems, our CEO is a self proclaimed salesman. He 100% is customer focused. The key is he has top notch technical & marketing leaders on his team that guide the overall technical direction.
I believe it is this combination that has enabled our company to be one of the top technical companies in the world. Some of you will hack on Cisco for security problems, IOS bugs, whatever (what large company doesn't have any bugs?), but I don't think anyone can truly say that Cisco is not completely committed to customer satisfaction. In the end, isn't that what matters most for any company?
my $0.02
Todd
The CEO skill that's in shortest supply: GETTING IT!
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
A modern CEO of a computer company does not need to know how to operate a computer, they need to know how to operate a business. It doesn't matter if you are selling computer chips or potato chips, all businesses are run *about* the same way. The skills that a non-tech CEO would need are an open mind willing to listen to input from all levels, and the ability to surround themselves with good people that know the tech part.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Well, at least here on /. it is...
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
Frankly, I would suspect the best boss for a tech company (from a consumer perspective) would be non-technical, and would demand from his/her systems the simplicity for a non-technical person to operate them.
Note: I work in tech support, so my comment is probably colored by having to tell people what a keyboard is, how to right click, that rebooting is different than reformatting, and so forth.
How about technical competency? I won't say for whom I work, but time and time and time again, the PHBs f*ck things up. It's time for the engineers to take back what used to be called hi tech.
JB
For a second there, I thought this was submitted by my boss, to test me, but then I remembered my boss doesn't read Slashdot!
They just talk with sales reps.
hehehe
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Simply because when it gets down to the crunch, you have to know if your engineers are bullshitting you or not. There will always be those that say something can't be done when it can be.
If I had created the world I wouldn't have messed about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers
...and if you can truly manage, it doesn't matter what the "subject" is really. If you have a grasp of the basics (and even most non-technical people have a grasp of some computer basics), and you know how to manage people, then you will do well. You have to be able to hire smart people, make sure they know what they're doing (and if they don't, it becomes evident even if you don't know the advanced stuff, when things don't get done), and run interference from upper management, and inspire the people below you.
If you can do that effectively, for the most part, you can manage.
libertarianswag.com
... about technology. Otherwise we would probably sell our products with half the features (the ones that might actually work and make sense).
Our reputation would be better then I guess, but I really doubt that it would help our bottom line in the market segment we're in.
I guess it's obvious why I'm posting that anonymously.
There's a big difference.
The ideal executive has excellent leadership qualities. He/she can paint a picture of the where you are going and make the idea of going there sound very exciting. You cannot underestimate this. Salesmanship plays a big role as well. A CEO is forever "selling" his company, be it to customers, investors or employees.
I don't think technical aptitude has much to do with it. In 1995, Cisco CEO John Chambers did not even have a PC on his desk, let alone use one. They seemed to do OK.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Well, the technical knowledge is required of the CEO, but not deep down technical knowledge, like being able to parse Assembly code thrown out by debugger. Gerstner understood his business, and understoof the fact that engineers design stuff while sales people sell it.
I've read his book about his experience at IBM and most of it dealt with getting rid of middle layer (IBM had so many managers, that half of the time the secretaries of the managers would arrive at a meeting instead of the managers). Guess who else suffers from managerial overflow.
Also Gerstner started layoffs in groups that did not produce any valuable products and that grew enormously by hiring, but never delivering real results. Some smart people there, but not capable of delivering a 1.0. The layoffs caused lots of criticism.
So generally while technical knowledge is advised, more often than not it's the CEO's organizational skills and ability to spend X dollars to earn Y dollars where Y>X.
...no matter who does it. Yes, technically oriented companies have been led into oblivion by CEOs that are clueless about what they are selling. But just as many, if not more, technical companies have been led into oblivion by technical CEOs that are cluless about their potential customers or the business world.
Don't forget that Jobs saw his competition as IBM, not Microsoft. That was the point of the "1984" Super Bowl ad, he was making fun of IBM. He totally misjudged the real threat to Apple.
What was the point of this "news" item?
Personally, I've been bitten by managers that are *too* technical.
People who want to dive too deep into the tech, when they're job is more about facilitating and steering from good thoughts of others.
My best managers have been those who have been out of the coding game long enough to know a good idea, but not necessarily how to implement them.
My worst have been people who graduated with a masters in Comp Sci, and thought they knew better then the developers: turning them into nothing more then factory workers, pushing buttons in a direction that always ended up being less then adequate.
- - - -
KickingDragon
The only thing a non-techical manager needs is the common sence to listen only to the people that know what they are talking about. Managers that focus on consensus building or other politically friendly, but technically agnostic strategies are destined for failure.
Popular agreement is not the same thing as correctness.
Liberty you never use is liberty you lose.
I have just left an institution where 3 departments (IT, Media/Print and Library Services) were merged. It was a total disaster! My managers were the former head of Media/Print and a library sub-department manager and neither of them had the first clue about how to run an IT department. I saw the service and quality of the department (both to customers and in terms of job-satisfaction) degrade enormously in the 18 months I stayed with the company post-merger. I can only speak from my personal experience but it seems to me that only technical managers are qualified to manage technical people.
Running a succesful company requires a number of things. Background and a strong understanding in the industry is only one of them, and not always the most important one.
If the manager is good at delegation, good at recgonizing and promoting the strenghts of his/her employees that helps.
At the end of the day the manager should be dependent on the skills and knowledge of their product anyway (even if they have a strong competant knowledge) so wether they have to pick up the background as they go or they already have it, it's almost inconsuiqential.
Brian
...is when they are out of their knowlege base.
Remember, sometimes asking questions from ignorance, asking "well, why DO things need to be that way?" is the route to a good idea.
And sometimes, you are just asking programmers why they keep putting bugs in their code and telling them that they need to put more features in, instead.
A good non-technical manager for a technical company needs to be more of the first and less of the second.
Gentoo Sucks
You can run lots of businesses with the top salesman. However, a growth oriented tech company needs a tech oriented person in charge. This is how Microsoft has remained on top.
A mature industry like PC manufacturing can survive with a showman at top, like Apple and Dell.
Never, ever let the accountants take over. Just look at GM for what happens when the accountants take over.
- Loyal to the troops, and demands loyalty back ....
- Loyal to the managers above, and demands loyalty back
- Moderates the sh*t rolling downhill
- Let's the troops know the important stuff
- Understands the goals and keeps the team congruent
- Provides a beer fridge when the going gets rough
- Does not sit still for pettiness and backbiting
- Mentors
-
Oh, be still my beating heart. What cloud-cuckoo-land is this I imagine?
668: Neighbour of the Beast
If you want to lead an IT, you'll need a manager with competent technical skills, or he will not understand, why to switch from Exchange or win2k serverpark to something else.
Or the same thing, he agrees to use linux, since 'everyone uses it' - but he only allows RH.
That's a sysadmins nightmare.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
High-tech companies should avoid appointing CEO's who's educational backround is in Medieval History.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Darryl McBride, who with his 19 years of executive management and leadership experience, singlehandedly led the formerly faltering SCO to develop a state of the art product like Linux.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
One of my best managers had no technical background. He was just very sensitive to the needs of everybody who worked for him.
Because of this, his team was very efficient and very loyal.
If you're a manager, you should probably be delegating most of the technical anyway.
Why doesn't Slashdot ever get slashdotted?
Yes' it's entirely possible...assuming that the manager, in addition to being compentent in all manageresque activities, understand and accepts that he simply doesn't know what the fsck is going on in regards to the technical aspects, and solicits information, knowledge, and advice from those who do on a regular basis.
That being said, I've been in situations where the tech-impaired manager does just that (result: success and happiness), as well as situation where he/she doesn't (result: seppuku-inspiring failure).
I have to say I prefer the former, although a lot can be said for the latter; watching your manager continually make a fool of himself is entertaining, although you will eventually find yourself chuckling to yourself while standing in the unemployment line.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Depends on the size of the company.
A smaller company will have the main manager selling the product at the same time. He needs to know the product.
A larger company will separate daily operations from selling the product. The manager makes sure that the team is heading the right direction, he tells the tech team where to go, not how to do it.
A Manager will work for a large company, but as long as he's not marketing the product.
As long as these people managers listen to their technical manager counterparts, they can be very successful.
Realistically though, Big Business promotes people due to age, wardrobe, ass-kissing, lineage, sexual favors or sheer lottery before they'd do it due to actual skill. So the chances of getting both a good people manager and good technical manager together are slim. It's more likely to find a good technical manager who doesn't completely suck at people management, and let them run the show.
Best quality these days?
Ability to speak Hindi or Mandarin.
Look at HP, a great example of "CEO skills" at work. What happened to pormoting from within or at least within your own industry.
And people wonder why the tech economy is so bad...Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
Am I precient or what? I just finished writing a gripe piece in my latest JE about how technologically challenged management is the cause of all technological flaws today. Check out my JEs and look for the "GRIPE" subject.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
In my experience some of the best managers I have had have not been highly technical.
One woman in particular managed a software development group in a telecommunications company. Probably the best manager I have ever worked directly for. She was lightly technical, she could understand the larger technical issues but as you got deeper they quickly got over her head.
I am making a distinction between her being a good manager and her being a good person to be managed by. I happen to think she was both.
So I believe a non-technical person can manage a technical group or a technical company. I believe they do need to surround themselves with people who can address the technical issues though.
There is no blanket answer. The most important thing is to make sure the person has good character and decision making skills.
Sculley depositioned Apple, and nearly destroyed it. The Apple board of directors seemed to like him, because he'd helped Pepsi survive under Coke market dominance, but Microsoft is no Coke, Apple is no Pepsi, and sugarwater is no iPod.
Gerstner took IBM from a $15B loss, back when a billion dollars was real money, to a rebirth that has seen profitabililty and respect return to the computer giant. To say nothing of tech superiority: PowerPC anyone? ThinkPads? They ran the HD biz so hard into the future that they practically wore it out, before discarding it in favor of Flash, nanotech and MEMs.
These tech businesses are businesses first, technology sources second. In every case, we make tech to do our work, even when our work is our hobby. So the CEO has to make the company work first. When there's a tension between the corporate culture and the tech culture, the CEO has to resolve that tension such that the business works, so it can produce tech. You can't fix the business with better tech.
--
make install -not war
...you have to admit: you don't become the richest man in America by being an idiot at running a company.
I'd love to read the real story on Bill Gates. I still despise the way Microsoft conducts a lot of its business but wealth is a measure of success, especially when the owner of that wealth got booted out of school.
Or managing a McDonald's or running a call center.
Yes, the managment skills required to run some businesses are fairly generic.
To run a growing, successful high tech venture, you need tech savvy and well as vision. You'v got know what's going to work and you've got be able to give and take with product development team. You can't rely on "marketing" to thread the needle. You've got to think it through and hit the right pitch. Just being a great manager doesn't mean you can survive an ill-conceived product. The product has to be right. If you don't understand the product, you will fail.
In your experience, can managers with little technical knowledge successfully run a technically-oriented company?
You'll need to produce a counterexample first.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
It's two different arts: management and engineering.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
It is balance that makes a man, it is balance that makes a company. A CEO does not run a company, she/he runs a part of the decesion making process. It is the ability to take risks, be modest and agreessive that makes a compnay's CEO sucessful with his company.
Just because you are trained by profession as an economist you are better of as a person managing funds and a buisness venture, not always the case.
This is a broad question to answer human nature and traits and should be asked on a case by case basis.
The slashdot posting should've been about the top 10 software companies and their CEO's background in technical fields etc...
This is a general question and has a general answer for specificity please try to choose an example next time.
Now for the Slashdot favorite heavyweight Apple; Steve Jobs and team have done a great job. Brought a computer company back from the dead and increased stock prices. Great achivement. I am not quite sure what their backgrounds are but Appl;e does employ a good marketing department and a even better forecasting department. Maybe a CEO just gets the right people together to create a sucessful good/service??
A manager is responsible for coordinating people and processes. While it would help for the manager to have some knowledge of the work the people he/she manages does on a day to day basis, it is more important that the manager understands the needs of the team. A good manager should be able to identify individuals who consistantly out perform their peers. They could be someone who cooks french fries to just the right crispness, or a programmer who always comes through in a crunch.
So, in my opinion it isn't as important that they understand the technology, but that they understand the business and people involved.
VD
the *last* thing you want is a geek who will insist that all production systems should run the latest, most bleeding edge stuff.
Geeks are easily distracted by shiny things.
Better to have someone at the helm who is less shiny-thing-obsessed.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
He was the man who made the decision to take IBM down the Linux path, even though he was not primarily a technical guy. The secret is to find competent subordinates and listen to what they say.
-aiabx
Just this guy, you know?
... the quality of person at Cisco TAC has declined over the past five to ten years. My current boss, who used Cisco equipment extensively in his previous job's WAN/LAN operations, said that was one of the saddest things he saw happen. He went on to explain how Cisco TAC used to be one of THE BEST technical support groups he had EVER dealt with. Now he says that it's difficult to call TAC and get an accurate answer to a problem.
So, I guess Cisco isn't as committed to upholding front-line customer support like it once was. I guess it must still be good for large corporate clients, though.
What qualities would such a manager need to keep a tech company healthy?
A love of black turtlenecks?
You can't take the sky from me...
Is this a surprise to anyone? Having non-technical backgrounded managers are for one, cheaper, and two easier to be dictated to by upper management, since they don't even know what their department does...
don't be retarded.
Enough business knowledge and a network. That's what managers with loads of technical knowledge need to successfully run a technically-oriented company. There are very few of these around.
/.)
If a sugar water salesman gets the right technical advisers he is more likely to succeed than a techie with a good PR adviser.
In case you wonder, I'm a techie (what a surprise on
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Um.... Yeah duh? Next question please.
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
The reason is that one of the most important roles of a CEO is to be the guy who makes the final decision when lower-level managers can't agree. If the boss doesn't "get it", it can be a problem even if he's surrounded by technical genisues, since his underlings will tend engage in political battles centered around what should technical decisions. This is where only a figure with unambiguous authority AND knowledge of the matter at hand can resolve the issue quickly.
Peer Pressure
I work for a small software company started by a guy who has worked in high places for a number of companies and for the govenment. He also has an MBA. He saw a need for a certain product so hired a couple programmers and worked at it for a few years. The product was a huge success and the company is doing very well now. It has grown and been around for almost 10 years now. He wasn't very technical but is a great salesman, strongly believes in his products, knows them inside and out and has learned the lingo from us programmers. Over the years he has learned a lot about computers. He knows the industry the product is targeted for inside and out, and has many contacts. That probably helped a lot.
A difficult-to-copy but easy-to-acquire signature for those purchase forms?
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
Digital Equipment Corporation under Robert Palmer, Wang Laboratories under Richard Miller, Polaroid under William J. McCune, and of course Hewlett-Packard under Carly Fiona demonstrate clearly that it takes a business person to run a business.
Addle-headed technical people without marketing expertise are apt to introduce boneheaded products like the PDP-1, the Wang Word Processor, the Model 110 Pathfinder Camera, the HP-35 calculator, etc. etc. when none of these products were backed by solid evidence from focus groups showing that consumers had any need of them.
They also have a disturbing tendency to be perfectionists, and build products that are better, more reliable, and more durable than they actually need to be, adding cost and decreasing margins.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
It boils down to two things: 1. Ability to lead people (notice I didn't say "manage"), and 2. Ability to see the future. Many top dogs do one or the other well. The great ones can do both.
Is it a given that a technical person (engineer) could run a company? This means dealing with all the HR, pay, pricing, revenue, customer, industry issues? The best answer I've ever heard of around this is, a CEO needs to give direction. This doesn't mean we head due east and everyone not due-east is in trouble. No. It's about getting everyone to head generally east. Getting everybody in the right general direction. The more I think about it ... the more I realize it's true.
D
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
I had a non-technical manager that can either be the best or the worst boss in the world.
He's the best boss in the world when he recognizes that he lacks knowledge of important details needed to make a lot of decisions, and doesn't make decisions without consulting his employees and considering our advice first.
But he is terrible when a decision comes up that involves something that he thinks he knows, so he starts ignoring the advice of people who know much better. It's pretty much the usual, "No, let's use FileMaker Pro because it says right here on the box that version 7.0 not supports true relational joins, can handle millions of records in a table, and works as an ODBC data source." type thing.
...who knows what he does not know. A manager who doesn't know tech is fine, provided he understands this and is willing to trust the technical people. As long has he understands that I am the specialist, so will accept when I say something is impossible or I know a better way to do things, there's no problem. It's when a non-technical manager dictates on technical matters that problems start.
I am trolling
This past Saturday I had the experience of interviewing a guy who, I had hoped, could take over the part-time network admin position that I have held at a small, non-profit organization for several years. I had developed a good working relationship with the organization, but had to step down after my full-time job became much more time-consuming. Our interview was the technical portion in a two-parter.
This man's resume was filled with past glorious and lofty titles such as "Director of Information Technology", "Manager of IT", and so on. Initially I felt awkward interviewing him, as he has had twice the number of years working in IT as I have (and I have been working for quite a while). However, when I began to ask him to explain what a TCP 3-way handshake was, he had this blank look on his face that was utterly horrifying. I also tried to get him to explain what a certificate authority is, and all he could say was, "Uhh...".
Mind you, this admin position is by no stretch of imagination an extremely technical one; the only thing we are asking him to do right off the bat is to migrate the organization's email infrastructure from POP3 to Exchange 2003. But this man, who in his past positions was in charge of directing other technical people's work, could not answer simple technical questions. Another question he got stumped on was the *BASIC* concepts behind VPN. The only magic word I heard from him was "encrypt", but little of everything else was useful.
We are in the process of looking for someone else to fill the position. I have already submitted my recommendation that he be held in queue until we can find someone much better. I am hopeful that it will not take long.
In your experience, can managers with little technical knowledge successfully run a technically-oriented company?
No
If you want to make technically sound products I think you need technically sound people making the decisions.
You don't need to be the greatest technical genius in the world to run the company but you do need to understand what the company does, how it operates internally, and prefarably understand what those "below" you actually have to spend their time doing. Obviously technical knowledge alone doesn't make a good manager, but it's still important. The German Automotive industy always had a tradition of promoting staff with technical experience from within the ranks of the company and as a result always produced reliable, well built, quality cars.
The American car industry on the other hand...
Of course it's quite possible to make good money with bad products, Microsoft is not the biggest software company in the world because of their track record of innovation....
I work in a mid sized retail store, I have a manager who is a technical, but unfortunately he has not been keeping up with his technical skills. He took some courses on how to install Netware 3.11 way back in the day, and he preaches today that Netware 3.11 is the most stable and best suited fileserver for our POS system.
He believes that our "Communication Server" which simply syncronizes inventories of the retail stores, are adequate running windows 98 and using PCAnywhere 8.1 scripted to transfer some database files from store to store to get them all up to date.
He also believes that our POS system (Which is written in Fox4) is an excellent database tool, because it only needs to be completely re-indexed daily and has so many compatability issues with today's hardware that it can't be the POS system which was made and developed in the late 80's, but rather the hardware today "isn't made like how it used to be."
What I am getting at, is that it doesn't matter if your manager is technical, it's if he understands *today's* technology. I just listen to this guy and laugh to myself while they reboot their 'communications server' daily because 'there must be a virus on it or something'. Heaven forbid it could be the crummy memory management of Windows9x.
Without someone technically inclined informing a manager of what is right and what is not, we'll always be stuck with outdated people in technical jobs. If there is somebody with technical experience who can report to the managers, it gives the store managers something else to worry about instead of learning the newest and greatest database software.
Honestly managers, don't get too technical, leave that up to us and go manage your business, you'll never get both done properly at the same time.
I'll probably get modded to hell for this, but whatever. One thing that really sucks about the IT world, sometimes, is the geeks. You know, the people who ALWAYS tell you to RTFM when you're asking newbie questions, or show fanboyish favouritism about certain areas of tech, or still in this day and age make fun of windows users.
These are the sort of people who like to be really condescending to others (particularly those they think know less), and managers need to know how to manage them properly, because apart from the usual management problems that you'll run into, these are the sorts of people who're going to get really snooty if they feel that they could manage the office or design a system better than the manager just because they're excellent at organizing source code.
Now, before you get all fired up over that comment, notice how +5 mods you'll see for posts that talk about how managers should respect the abilities of their subordinates? Chances are pretty good that every other person out there who agrees with those sentiments secretly suspects that they're smarter than their manager BY DEFAULT. That's a tough situation to manage. I'm sure some of this has to do with how many managers from hell lack good people skills, but more than a little of this is because people like to have their egos stroked, geeks especially.
So, if you're going to be a manager and keep your subordinates happy, notice that you'll need to do a lot of ego-management.
The problem with that is evaluating the people you hire. How can you say a guy knows what he's doing if YOU don't know what he's doing? Not to say it's impossible, but it can be difficult. From what I've read, the most successful companies in the fortune 500 have top people who were promoted from within. They know how the company operates and what it's capable of. The CEO of XOM for example started there as a chemist - there's a lot more to running the company than that, but he knows what they do and understands how it's done and what's possible.
I contrast that to Amazon, where I interviewed last year for a senior management position. I got to the last round interviews, but was discounted from futher consideration because I didn't have "enough technical skills". Which is funny, because they didn't ask me a single challenging technical question.
They really wanted their senior managers to be able to code hands-on, instead of managing developers via a solid SDLC methodology. Which might explain why their web site crashes so often during the holiday season.
I remember in one of my first code reviews a peer dressed me down for writing "inefficient" code, specifically, I think it was my "while" constructs. I was dumbfounded! I was given the lecture on compiler optimizations, blah, blah, blah. I dug in and claimed bullhockey -- it was more important to understand the code, not even necessarily for other coders, but for one's self should one have to revisit code after a long absence.
I know compiler theory, and that's basically what it is... if you write code to home in on compiler efficiency, you're doing it on theory, you don't necessarily know your compiler will do what you think it will. And for those of you who "do", you don't know where else your code will go and be compiled. You run the risk of propogating obtuse code (submit to Obfuscated Code...).
Besides, there's nothing like aging code to improve efficiency... for some reason my code is written so well, it runs twice as fast about every 18 months.
And, per another poster, code not worth timing is not worth optimizing... I've never known a bit-head who "optimizes" C-code to time it to verify its improved efficiency.
It all depends. I can't stand it when people think you don't need to be technically inclined to run the show. It minimises the need artificially. I have said it once and I'll say it again. If the manager isn't technically inclined, he ought to be willing to become. Likewise, if the technically inclined isnt' a good manager (and is being pushed into it) he ought to be willing to try to become. This applies to all jobs. If you manage an IT team, project, or organization, and you aren't willing to learn your project, architecture, approach, and essential technical details of your products or projects, then you have absolutely NO business managing said organization, team, or project.
That said, I personally think it is a waste of time to hire someone with no technical background to manage an IT team or organization.. no matter what his busines sence entails. Maybe hire him on as a consultant with power, but giving some big wig with management/personelle/vision skills into an organization with no ability/desire to learn the project is a recipe for a huge letdown. In _ALL_ circumstances.
I have no problem with hiring upper management without the technical experience. I do however have a problem with them becoming a technical liability at the cost of the entire workforce due to them making the wrong and incompetant decisions. How this applies to CEO's is IMO just the same. A CEO of a company which is doing technical work cannot progress their company if he does not see the marketplace as competitors' leaders do. And no non-experienced CEO has this ability without the required experience. Period.
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
Or, should I say, 'Apple and IBM' - completely different organziations. One had (at the time of Sculley's tenure, at least) only one main business focus; the other had (and has) its fingers in all sorts of pies.
How about a comparison of Jack Welch at GE (PhD in Chemical Engineering) vs. Louis Gerstner at IBM (Harvard MBA)?
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
Achille Talon
Hop!
But SOME industries require a great deal of technical insight on the part of management, in order to be successful at what they do.
Some industries, however, rely on connections, cronyism, and sleaze, on the part of management. A different kind of expertise.
In many ways, the Software industry has changed from the former, into the latter. Mostly in the past 10 years.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Being able to admit when they're wrong and changing direction prevents millions of wasted dollars and misery. Of course, a CEO has to stay the course some times, but has to know the difference.
Exercise to the reader: guess what I think of the current President.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
No.
I worked for Lou Gestner. His talent was making money by laying off people, selling off divisions, and making loans to other transnational companies. IBM is a ghost of its former technical self as a result.
In your experience, can managers with little technical knowledge successfully run a technically-oriented company?
The question isn't the important one.
Management may not quite "get" the nuts and bolts of a company, but can delegate and watch the bottom line. So I think any really good manager can run a company they know nothing about without running it into the ground.
The real question is
In your experience, can managers with little technical knowledge successfully run a technically-oriented company as well as managers with technical knowledge but otherwise equivalent skills.
And that, to me, is a resounding "no."
Knowing your industry is a prerequisite for exemplary performance. Understanding how things work gives you an edge that, simply, you can't get anywhere else. For technology (or medicine, or finance) there's often subtleties that you not only need to know, but will let you ask the right questions and understand the answers. Asking the right questions is how you manage the bottom line, make plans, and delegate responsibilities.
Secondly, a technical manager MUST be a good manager period. Just being technical isn't going to cut it today. Products rarely sell themselves, deals and alliances are needed, etc.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
you're talking about. Sure a CEO really just needs to know how to run a business, the lingo, the market, etc. But I've been in situations where my direct report (bottom level manager) was non-technical, and it sucks. The philosophy at that company was to move all the people who either couldn't code or had no desire to into Project Management, and it just doesn't work. In order to be a sucessful non-technical manager, you have to be high enough up the chain of command to just be able to take the steering wheel, and not have to worry about how the car works.
"The problem with internet quotations is that many are not genuine" -Abraham Lincoln
Shinny thing!!! OOOOuchh!!! Hey hey hey!! It 's moooovin!!!! Whoa! --Cat
I've seen the worst decisions. The worst choices and the worst outcomes exclusively from Bosses that had only one thing in common, non technical skills coupled with exceptional management skills.
Common traits of the non technical CEO
Intelligence without wisdom.
Courage without conviction.
and the worst trait
Authority without responsibility or ability or delegation skills.
Or the Golden Boy syndrome, where about every two weeks there is a new gold haired management expert to fix all that's bad where the light doth shine intensely out of his but and he can do no wrong.
A CEO should be able to do any subordinate function or at least grasp the technicalities of the tasks.
The real problem I suspect is that most CEO's, CIO etc... are obtained via agencies where the high ground is a sinkhole with respect to technical skill verifications.
Being a CEO is a like having obtained group membership in an exclusive club not a skill set, technical or otherwise.
[Sig quarantined by Microsoft AntiSpyware]
Seriously. A leader has to understand the business the company is in and in key ways it really doesn't matter what the 'technical' details are. Does Merrill Lynch need a mathematician who can trade 3rd order derivatives online? Does Glaxo need a molecular chemist leading the troops? Does Lockeed literally need a rocket scientist?
No or course not. A company needs a leader who can lead and can understand what it takes to succeed in that business. Now in some companies it might help to know the nits and gnats of technical arcana and many companies like in Big 5 consulting shops that is the only real career path. But on the whole 'up from the ranks' is not worth a lot.
Also don't discount the fact that the basic personality type of IT geeks is antisocial. I don't mean sociopathic like most CEO's I mean agoraphobic. Not a good skill set to run things.
The only thing a non-techical manager needs is the common sence to listen only to the people that know what they are talking about
Correct, but this is easier said than done. It requires identifying who knows what they are talking about - and to do this with confidence requires knowing everything they know, in which case you wouldn't need to ask in the first place.
I've had a couple of bosses who were very ignorant of the technological aspects of the work the company did. They were CIO's and were hired primarily because the company owner thought that a good manager should be able to manage anything.
One had some promise. He understood that he was, to be kind, completely devoid of any real understanding of the technology. He relied heavily on the knowledge of the staff and focused on the client facing and staff management aspects of the job. All was well, until it turned out he was a paranoid nut who started playing a variety of political games instead of doing the job, but until then, he was able to do well. He'd demonstrated that a good manger really can manage something of which they have limited understanding.
Another manager was the flip side. He had no understanding of the technology, and was, to be kind, a hand wringing, spineless jellyfish. The thought of pushing for the cash for a major hardware upgrade was beyond his capabilities, and all of our insistence that the system was dying fell on deaf ears because "Well, it's working now, isn't it?"
And when I say "hand wringing" I mean it literally. He would walk around wringing his hands like he was washing them, and whenever we discussed budgets or the need for new servers, he would get a terrified "Deer in the headlights" look in his eyes.
While he accomplished literally nothing and was, through his inaction, responsible for several major system crashes, he lasted a VERY long time, because he always told the owner what he wanted to hear, and blamed the IT staff when something went wrong, something the owner was apt to accept at face value.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I work for a company that believes that a manager does not need to know anything about the subject he is managing. The result is: technicians who produce must be salesmen, as well as highly technical.
Since the manager does not know what his people are doing, he relies on the best pitch proposed by his subordinates.
In one particualr case I know of, the manager defers a lot of decisions to the director who is technical and has much more experience than the manager does. This frustrates the subbordinates and has led to a number of his people simply bypassing him and going directly to the director for a decision.
One advantage I see to this is that non-technical managers, in an effort to not make a career-ending-move, tend to be much more politically savy. This leads to the group as a whole to getting more money for projects and better customer feedback than the technical managers who make the correct technical decisions themselves without consulting anyone.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
I haven't yet seen your sig turned into a slashdot cliche, so allow me the honor.
1. They ignore you
2. They laugh at you
3. They attack you
4. ??????
5. Profit!!!
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
I worked for an internet company and we had a non technical CEO who couldn't check his own email - he had to ask his PA to do it for him. He liked to brag about how he had millions in the bank and his x-employees followed him from job to job as he was such a great employer.
He was also very crap and only really interested in the possibility of getting brought out by another company. Guess which company he wanted us to be brought by... Digital Convergence... of cue cat fame. He kept telling us how much money Digital convergence had, then digital convergence went bankrupt.
Eventually he was ousted as CEO and the last thing i heard about him, he was running a topless bar and was being investigate for allegedly rapeing the chef.
I'm not quite sure what the moral of this story is. I never tried to follow him into the world of topless dancing despite his great leadership skills.
Above the level of "supervisor" or "team leader" managers need to have skills in management first. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has worked for people who were brilliant but completely incapable of managing me or my coworkers, either because of a disdain for the simple work of management or poor "people skills."
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
He has to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest, CEO in all of technology. He truly understood what his company had to do technologically to stay in front and he had the business sense to make it practical. Their software was and is often second rate at first but he's able to sell enough contracts that they could deliver the "real" software later. He knew what software would be important, the OS, Office, etc and although he was not a great visionary in what comes next, him company would quickly pounce on their competition and quickly deliver something to compete and destroy their competition. How? He controlled the OS market and this allowed them to build a monopoly to use to force whatever else they wanted.
He had the tech sense in that he was a programmer, studied math and is an all around smart guy. He made sure to surround himself with good talent to pound out all their software.
He understood software is the key (and for that he is visionary, face it) and built his business around that. Once he got the system that everything operates on, he knew that would make it easier to control everything else, and so it was done.
Bill Gates has to be the best model for a tech CEO/manager. He understood the business of it all and had the technological vision to know what viable and profitable and what limits existed.
The proof is in the pudding I guess.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Just look at what happened to HP under Carly Fiorina, and do exactly the opposite!
For the record, I don't think it is how tech-savvy a manager is that predicts how effective he (or she) will be. The very best manager I've ever worked with (actually there are two) wasn't technically adept, at all. But her most redeeming and valuable characteristics included:
On the other hand some of the very worst management I've ever worked with was quite technically savvy... but had no common sense about what managing a project (or company) meant.
Bottom line, while having good technical background may be useful, I don't think it has much relationship with the ability of someone to lead or manage. I think really good managers have good instincts, and my anecdotal experiences in life tell me these aren't traits one teaches... They know how to beg, borrow, barter, steal, and massage team members.... and do it intelligently and fairly and with dispatch.
Steve Jobs exemplifies a non-techy, successfully leading a technologically-oriented company. In fact, I think a non-techy can do well. . .IF he acknowledges his own blind spots. That's the key: A leader honest with his weaknesses. A leader who knows when to defer to his team of experts. . .The story goes that Henry Ford, once proclaimed himself to have expert knowledge in several fields, after which he immediately brought in his team. . .
The worst case, ( and many, including myself have worked for such schleps ) is working for a CEO who fronts as expert, or even knowledgeable, when he has no clue. That is a recipe for disaster - denial.
In my experience, the manager's ego issues determine his effectiveness. Some think they're god's gift to the technical team - and they eventually (none too soon!) drown in their own bullshit. The good ones realize they know shit about the details, and listen carefully to their top technical people. They tend to do well, get promoted, and leave a vacancy soon to be filled with an idiot from the first category.
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
Either you understand your product and its market, or you do not.
Doesn't matter whether it's Fig Newtons or Apple Newtons.
Beyond that, people skills and financial skills are fully fungible.
I had to chuckle when I saw this. Last week we hired a new manager for me (yes, me - I'm the entire technical support/software development department in a 6-person company). When I say we hired him, I don't actually mean I had anything to do with the decision process. Evidently, my six years here (far longer than anyone but the owner) have not been sufficient to give me any insight into the company's needs. But in the words of said owner, I should "consider myself lucky to be able to work under this guy with all of his technical background and expertise."
I've spent the last four workdays trying to get this guy up to speed with some of the unique apsects of our company - like the intricacies of using "cd" to change directories, and the complexities of absolute pathnames. Oh, and the highly-touted technical background turns out to be an A+ cert. W00t!!
The world is full of tools and I (now) work under two of them.
I have found there are just two ways to go.
It all comes down to livin' fast or dyin' slow. -REK, Jr.
Well actually no they don't really need to be. They just need to be able to trust the people they have working for them in the technical areas and must exhibit exceptional leadrship ability.
I have much more to add but I don't to seem to be ranting...
I'm ex-military. Ex-USAF. Commissioned officer, six years service, got out after the Berlin Wall came down.
And you're right. I am missing the USAF.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
It's worth noting that the second time around Steve put Avie Tevanian in charge of software, the lifeblood of Apple.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The best managers see the big picture, and lead the company from that vision. Is it important that they understand their products? Yes, to the extent that they know what they do and have a basic understanding of how it works and why that makes it better (or inferior) to their competitors. Just like a project leader in a software company need not know about every segment of code, a manager need not know every little thing that's going on. Otherwise, you get trapped in the details, and when are you going to have time to step back and see the big picture again. Better to hire good people in R&D whose job it is to know the technical details and worry about the small things and, as someone said above, surround yourself with competent people. Who, not at all ironically, you are managing. Knowledge doesn't hurt, but applying it can.
I'll tell you what a non-technical manager needs... a few smart techies that he trusts. They make the technical decisions for him. He trusts their judgement even tho he doesn't completely understand it. As long as these techies are smart with their decisions and explanations he will succeed and will go on to make other non-technical decisions throughout the day. So, yes, a non-technical manager can be successful in a technical company. So long as his right hand men are technologically learned. ;)
the knowledge of technology and being able to handle people. I don't think a business person should be put near a datacenter or have someone technical under them. I have had three business bosses and they were really bad. I have had five technical bosses and they were all better than the business oriented ones. Also - they need to recognize when their employees are doing things for their own self service more than they are for the company. I work in a big company and the money that gets spent just for self promotion is rediculous - people buy crap just so they can say the have so big of budget. stop that crap and actually start serving the good of the company and your fellow emplyees.
You know the old adage, "those who can't, teach?"
Well, it's partially true, the change that makes it 100% true is this:
"Those who can't, manage."
If a person has to leave a technical position to become a manager, it's because they're no good at their technical job - I have found that true with EVERY manager I have come across who has held a developer position. The problem with this is, seeing as they can't hack development, they turn to management where their former colleagues/now employees learn very quickly that they can't manage either.
Give me a manager who admits to not knowing what the fsck their project is about, and only wants timelines and status, and I'll show you a manager techs will trust.
Either leaders within their own company or leaders at a rival, they tend to have significant sales experience.
It tends to create a very strong perspective for a CEO as he's used to "if our products don't sell, I don't eat". Which remains true at his level. Well, sort of. It used to, before the age of the golden parachute and other tricky contract clauses.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
When Gerstner joined the company there was serious talk of breaking it up and selling off the components to...whoever. Now it is the dominant systems company (again).
They communicate between owners (shareholders) and staff. They work to set financial goals and analyze why they did or did not meet them. They network with other CEOs, bankers, politicians, etc. They talk to the tech people and ask what they need and then try to get it for them.
Besides, Monosodium glutamate, high-fructose corn syrup and yellow #5 weren't even available in 1905.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
...is a complete luddite and look how awesome she's doing over there at HP! Oh...wait...
Our COO knows Access... We have all these evil Access 97 databases that we have to suffer with. I feel your pain.
I agree, If a company has capable staff, what it takes is a capable leader, if he can delegate tasks and handle everything with the staff under him through way of advisors, and he himself is capable of handling the end to end business. Its golden, and knowing alot about the field is just a bonus..
Non-technical managers can run a great tech company. I've worked at technical and non-technical companies that had technical and non-technical management. The answer isn't black & white. Where non-technical management run afoul, is when they read the "Dummies" book, or take a single class at their community college, or read an article and decide on that organizations technical direction. The greatest non-technical management I've worked for is ones that balance their decision making by seeking out answers from proven advisors in those areas. The WORST I've seen is the same situation, but the "proven advisor" was just another sales guy that read the same article.
Steve Jobs, while a brilliant manager is really not that much of a techie. He just happens to have a knack for driving techies.
There seems to be an optimal relationship between the autistic nature of geeks and the OC/ADD nature of salesmen that seems to bring about good work. Look at the symbiotic relationship of Jobs/Woz or Gates/Allen.
A good tech manager gives an interface to the deep geeks. Sure they have to have some idea of what tech does, but that doesn't mean they have any idea of how it works.
In many ways it's good they don't understand... it allows them to push geeks who know it can't be done. Really it's because Jobs didn't know the Mac couldn't be done that he was able to push his geeks to do it.
Management has nothing to do with Tech. A tech manager has to be able to pass himself off as a geek when necessary to provide a seamless user interface to their minion, but in reality they are basically coaches. Coaches may wear track suits and sneakers, but generally they'd be out of breathe if you had them do a few situps. Coaches don't have to be able to do... coaches need to know how to do, they need to know how to motivate and coordinate to get things done.
Agreed, managers must know enough to realize their limitations. Not only was the recently fired HP CEO Carly Fiorina not able to realize her limitations, for example, she did not think her limitations mattered.
People say that the printer division is HP's last profitable division. However, it is not the printers that make money, but selling ink for $8,000 per gallon (mostly cheap solvent, bought in tank car loads).
If that is correct, HP is not a real business, but one that depends on taking advantage of its customers to make money.
If that is true, then Carly Fiorina was not a businesswoman at all, but merely able to give the appearance of competence. And that, in turn, means that people who write for the business press are completely incompetent, too.
Similarly, often the business press claims that Microsoft is a successful company. But would Microsoft have been successful if it had not had a very unusual situation in which it was able to arrange a virtual monopoly by breaking the antitrust law? Someone who had a monopoly on water, for example, could make Bill Gates look like a poor man in a week.
However, I have some disagreement with what you said. You said, "Translation: you don't have to know how to do everything or how everything works as long as you know that your knowledge is limited and someone else more technically minded probably should be listened to."
The problem with that is the manager must have enough technical knowledge to understand very well who has more technical knowledge than he, and who can therefore be trusted. Typically, that's a lot more technical knowledge than what people mean when they say "you don't have to know how to do everything or how everything works".
I work for a big financial company in the US. My manager hired me, never asked me any questions in my interview (probably because he didn't know what to ask), and has little tech ability. This effects my whole group because he has such little tech ability he doesn't even know who does or who does not know what they are talking about. I belive a good tech manager is like a good baseball manager; they know how to judge talent(ability) when they see it or hear it, and they know about or have experience in the area they are dealing with. I think a tech manager especially one not at the senior management level, should be able to answer any question pertaining to his/her group. The buck should stop at them.
Meeting with the client. Client asks question about confirmation when the user finishes some part of the application.
PM: "Yeah, sure, we've done this millions of times before, no problem. We'll just send a mail right to the database, right?" (Looks at me)
The term "Tradeskills" was coined by Michael Philips and/or Paul Hawken. Tradeskills referrs to a set of skills that successful business operators have by age 18. And one can't get these "Tradeskills" by taking an MBA. If a business operator (CEO or whatever) has both "Tradeskills" and the technical background - then he can likely run the IT company successfully. If the business operator knows the IT end - but lacks "Tradeskills" - the business will likely fail. The latter operator needs to find a partner or employee or consultant. Obviously Steve Jobs had/has the Tradeskills - Wozniak had the IT down pat. Sometimes someone who has "Tradeskills" appears slimey, cut throat - because of their aggressive focus - especially when dealing with someone who lacks "Tradeskills".
There are a number of attributes that a good manager must have, but there are differences depending on the type of business the company in in.
For example, all good managers need to know the business they are in. They need to understand the market, its products, what they do, and where his company is situated within that market. He/she must be able to recognize trends and prioritize new things. He does not have to be an expert in designing and building the product.
Of course, companies have many different needs. Some bosses handle production, some sales, some HR, some planning. When they work among peers, bosses are coaches/captains of the team. When they work among unskilled, they have to be guides and teachers and schedulers. When they work with sales, they need to be good ranchers, keeping the cattle on track and pointed in the right direction.
The best boss I ever had was my first, some 35 years ago. This was a peer-peer situation with a group of professionals, but what he said to me is universal and I have used it in every kind of situation since. He said "My job is to make your job easier. My job it provide you with the best tools, equipment, information, and working conditions that I can, and to help you do a better job. The better you look, the better I look. I am all for you being as successful as you can." That says it all.
Are you hinting at some sort of anti-Microsoft bias here on /. ?? I mean, that sounds pretty outrageous to me but it really seems like that's what you're getting at.
If you're going to make such subtle accusations, please sir, provide evidence!
Unfortunately good technical savvy requires one stay up to date and keep trying things out.Examples of very stupid stuff I've heard:
"This product must be built with C++": Umm, err, the was no C++ compiler available for the CPU in question. There was one for a similar CPU - it could be made to work but would not exploit some nifty features and would generate bloaty slow code. The current Code base which was to be reused was C, so an effort was started to C++-ify the code. A lot of time was lost trying to comply with, then refute, this "wisdom".
"You can trade off memory against CPU for performance": Semi-true, sometimes. So the system needed about 4 MIPs of CPU and about 128kB of RAM. The CPU could only deliver about 2 MIPs. No problem says the manager, just double the RAM to 256kB. Unfortunately this "decision" was made while the true techies were on vacation. Cost a bundle of money and time to cancel the order and relay the board with a stonkier CPU.
"SPI is better than RS232": True, for many things... except the RS232 interface was removed from the device and the SPI bus was made available to the outside world. Instead of being able to just plug in to a PC for upgrade, a special RS232 to SPI adapter box (which was damn expensive) had to be shipped too. Luckily the product flopped - it would have been a pig to support.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The best manager I ever worked for was extremely non-technical. He didn't need to be; he had us for that. What he was excellent at was watching politics, looking after the needs and condition of his own people, and smelling bullshit a mile away...so he could tell which geeks to rely upon for advice. He'd bring me in with meetings or on conference calls, and afterwords have me digest things down into my take where it came to technical matters. I've worked for him twice, and we did great things...I hope to work with him again at some point.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Non technical managers in technical companies is the way it's done in Us. It's so unique to Us, there's even a term "entrepreneurial management" to describe us. To determine if it's successful, compare countries which use technical managers to countries which use non technical managers.
India is the world's largest IT producer. China is the world's largest semiconductor producer. Japan is the world's largest consumer electronics producer. Us has the highest engineer unemployment in the world, highest trade deficits in the world, and the lowest quality of life in the world.
I find it really amusing that this story has been so completely turned on it's head. If you take a look at Jobs' history, his technical skills are weak at best. His real tallent is on the marketing side of things.
Scully on the hand, while he clearly has skills on the marketing side of things (and was indeed selling "sugar-water" at Pepsi when Jobs was trying to hire him), actually started of on the engineering side of things and has demonstrable skills in that area. This is the guy who as a *kid* filed a patent on some color CRT techniques just one day after Sony beat him to the punch.
It's also worth noting that during the Sculley years, Apple's market share was impressive and grew quite well. While he made a mess of things in a lot of ways, Macintosh computers haven't achieved the market share they had under Sculley either before or since.
sigs are a waste of space
"Sculley just knew how to sell sugar water. He ran Apple right into the ground presumably because he didn't know anything about technology."
Once again, I always get a little torqued at this.
Sculley surrounded himself with some very good people, namely Jean-Louis Gassee and Guy Kawasaki. Unlike Jobs, he would actually listen to these people.
Keep in mind, under Sculley, Apple came out with:
LaserWriter
Hypercard
Macs with slots
32-bit Color
Newton
System 7
QuickTime
PowerBooks
Transition to PowerPC (though he didn't stick around for it)
In fact, Apple's "heyday", in regards to market share, was in the late eighties and early 90s when Jobs had left Apple.
The "blame" for running Apple into the ground goes more to Michael Spindler than anyone else.
I just said "goodbye" to a man hired in by my company (a national television network) who is going off to a subsidiary after getting his M.B.A. while on the job. His wife also had two children during his tenure.
I feel sorry for the guy in many ways. He was prevented from giving us the resources we truly needed to make a seamless transition into new technology; he was attending classes at a hard business school and he was doing the "new daddy routine" in being awakened every three hours by not one but two infants.
But I do have a problem with the concept of someone who has never actually made any television making judgements and purchase decisions on behalf of people who do make television for a living and whose jobs depend on continuing to crank out excellence. I do have a problem with him announcing: "There will be layoffs" in a meeting when the transition to new technology has not been started yet and there is absolutely no understanding of how many seats will have to be filled in order to make airtime on a daily basis with an absolutely inflexible deadline.
And now he will go to work in a medical field with absolutely no training in or understanding of medicine.
I suppose he can complain that he was ordered to cut costs by his superiors but he was too disinterested to really try to understand the business he was in and he was too yellow to push back when faced with orders that made no sense.
Only problem is that the people who gave him the order to cut staff will now be closer to the "production floor," which puts jobs in greater jeapordy. I wonder if this is what they're teaching in Business schools these days: You don't need to know the business; You don't need to be curious; You don't need to measure past performance in order to predict the future and you don't need to respond to the real needs of the situation. Oh, and you can best build a team by threatening everyone's job in order to set everyone against each other.
There are some managers who do pay attention who don't have any experience in actually making things work on the production level but, in my industry with large conglomerates owning media companies and trying to run them as if they were assembly lines making widgets, they seem to either not challenge the Corporate Line or get eased out.
I have heard that M.B.A. means "Mindless Brainless A-hole and in Corporate America today with no corporate interest in being a good citizen and no investment in employees, that seems to be borne out in experience.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
Riiiiiight... that's why I'm not eligible for vulnerability or bug-fix IOS / pix upgrades for fifty-odd bits of network eqpt. bought from Cisco unless we have current smartnets on everything.
That's not driven a decision driven by 100% focus on customer satisfaction. That's driven by extra sales, i.e. profit -- they used to let anyone download IOS updates for free, even if just on the sly. It's enough to make me wonder if their CEO is more of a salesperson than a tech guy...
You later find out that your boss actually has shares in FileMaker Pro, or had a past incarnation as a FileMaker Pro Architect (assuming there could be such a thing *shudder*).
Knowledge of an enterprise's products or service will make a good manager even better.
No amount of technical no-how will make a crappy manager a good one.
"In 1995, Cisco CEO John Chambers did not even have a PC on his desk, let alone use one."
Here's a comment about John Chambers. Look at the others in the same thread. A lot of people think Cisco is doing a very poor job.
If it takes 10 years to sink the company, does that mean the non-technical manager can be considered a good manager for 10 years?
Part of Cisco's secret has been a lack of competition for some very high-level products for which there was not good competition.
When they sense there is bad management, the best technically oriented people don't leave immediately. They may carry the company for several years. Then customer inertia may carry the company for several more years.
I had a boss like this who while we were still doing product evaluations, went in and signed off on a purchase order for the product that was the most expensive and also the most suspicious, which we had made abundantly clear, because the salesman wanted to get it in at the by his December deadline before our office closed for two weeks.
So, turns out, product is a steaming pile of shit and we end up blowing through a million bucks in various consultants, "training" (I use that term VERY loosely), subsequent product buys to patch up the broken pieces, before he realizes he needs "a fall guy," so he starts dismissing all the consultants, starting with the project manager and the system architect, because he could do both of those things, right? No, seriously, he actually said that in the meeting after they were dismissed. Finally he was down to two programmers (one being me). With nothing left to do, he proceeded to fire both of us. I'm sure he felt he'd really saved the day by getting rid of all those problem people who had the entire time been advising to do precisely the opposite of what he chose to do.
In one meeting he had the gall to say "this project is my career advancement vehicle." Well, buddy, finish it your damned self... since you're the only one still employed on the project, godspeed and good luck.
Okay... Maybe that's why HP's printer software is so medieval.
If you try to uninstall the latest Windows software that HP provides for one of its printers, the uninstall deletes something like 9,000 files in your C:\WinNT folder, leaving the OS completely inoperative, of course.
A manager needs to understand the technical details if they need to deal with them on a day-to-day basis. Line managers need to understand the basics if they are going to be able to work with those they manage. Higher up in the company, understanding technical details becomes less important. If your CEO is spending time trying to decide the pros and cons of Oracle versus MS SQL Server, you've got a big problem.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
With the recent departure of Carly Forina from the top post at HP, it is interesting to note that there are no Fortune 50 CEOs that are female. The Lawrence Summers fiasco also highlights the dearth of women in technical fields. This is due to inherent differences in the sexes, according to Summers. But even if that were found to be true, it doesn't explain why L'Oreal is run by a dude.
The fact is, business is hesitent to employ women in top fields. So whatever qualifications you place on managers the one quality that certainly does not rise to the top is a vagina.
That implies, to me at least, that all the other criteria for a good manager discussed thus far in this topic are highly subjective. Your results would be equally effective by mounting a set of categories on a rotating circular board and throwing darts to set your standards.
And for those who believes women cannot be tough and single-minded in their purpose, I have only two words: Margaret Thatcher.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Why use a select that returns BILLIONS of records, when you can write a select that will return MILLIONS of records!
"Cisco Systems, our CEO is a self proclaimed salesman"
I listened to John Chambers talk at the last Gartner Symposium, and he alternated between sounding like an utter genius to being retarded.
No joke.
I can't decide if the guy is the smart guy on the planet, or somebody who escaped from a loonie bin.
He? I didn't realize Carly Fiorina was a "he."
My expectation here:companies with intensive need for ongoing technical innovation need technical leaders. Larger companies need folks with a broader array of skills.
Now, that said, I think the first really successful "AI" Programs will essentially handle all of the functions of a CEO-so at that point, what you'll really need is a mascot that inspires the troops and customers. Look at what a CEO does:
a) write memos/emails to various folks
b) analyzes budgets and produces appropriate goals/strategic documents
c) reviews contributions to the above from subordinates
d) interact with/motivates subordinates.
e) makes various ceromonial speeches.
Why can't software do essentially the same thing? Instead of hiring a CEO, the board could just choose a software program and a real life mascot(maybe an experienced actor) for the situations where a human really was necessary.
In my best job, the manager:
- Somewhat understood what I did, only as much as she needed to.
- Didn't try to do my job, and made sure others didn't interfere with it.
- Made sure that the "team" was talking and everyone was on the same page.
In other jobs, the manager(s):It's not about ego-enlargement at all. For myself, and many geeks I've met, it's simple about allowing us to do our job, and at times trusting that we know more than the marketdroids about how to do it efficiently. As far as ego goes, I have more issues with respect. Some people regard geeks as glorfied button-pushers and treat them thusly. I don't need my ego stroked but neither do I care to have people looking down upon me.
and that's good
Where this thing becomes vicious, however, is when the new set of managers and/or architects takes over, they promptly proceed to kill the fully functioning custom-built system... claiming cost savings and dozen other benefits. How? By purhcasing yet another crappy multi-million dollar system (usually CMS, sometimes xml/RDBMS-integration system, other times rules or business workflow engine -- whatever buzzword d'jour happens to be), leading to another fiasco.
I finally left the company, after getting "deja vu all over again": having to re-invent the third party dream for the third time (alas, I'm not exaggerating). But I'm sure the company will keep on doing its death spiral for a while -- it's still very stable company, finance-wise.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
There is a vivid picture of an asshole on that page.
In my experience, a person that manages programmers not only has to be a programmer, but an experienced industry programmer. How else are they to gain the insights necessary in order to manage programmers? We're not assembly-line workers. We're not even skilled-tradesmen -- the average experience-demanding Internet job ad notwithstanding. We're somewhere between engineers and inventors. We're like the non-fantasy equivalent of magicians.
Only twice in my 12 years in the software industry have I had a manager that was an experienced industry programmer. (One was male, one was female, FYI.) And those were the best two experiences of my life. The development teams were well-organized, the goals were realistic (but still tightly scheduled), and I actually got the answers to questions I needed answered in order to do my job.
I remember being "managed" by MBA types with "general technical backgrounds". What a nightmare.
One judged the worth of an employee by how many hours they put in, not how much work they did. My job was to get a PlayStation 2 video game running within the frame rate limit, and there was no documentation, no source-code comments, no institutional knowledge of the source code, and no institutional concept of why anyone would ever want any of that. Nevertheless, I did, in 5 weeks, what the other programmers in the company hadn't been able to do in 6 months. He fired me because I could only put in 50 hours a week without collapsing. Now I have a wonderful 5-week-long salaried position on my work record. Boy, don't I look good to potential employers now. Thanks, Randy.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
In your experience, can managers with little technical knowledge successfully run a technically-oriented company?" What qualities would such a manager need to keep a tech company healthy?
Good managers don't need to be full of in-depth technical knowledge.
They should have people like that working for them.
They should be intelligent, quick-learners and able to delegate to their good people where they need technical expertise that they themselves do not have.
Unfortunately, many managers and many technical people consider it a Badge of Failure if they do not know the latest trivia about any technical subject that is asked. Good managers aren't held hostage to feeling insecure about their lack of technical knowledge, but they are intelligent enough to know if their people are good, concise, have axes to grind, are unnecessarily long-winded, are trying to make co-workers look bad, whatever.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Competently that is. In a high-tech field it may take the supervisor longer to do a task, but he still should have the ability to do the job.
Simpson was bought in as a deal maker. He took GEC, sold off the defence business to BAe, renamed the rump of the company Marconi and turned it into a telecom company. So far so good, and the share prices soared. Unfortunately neither he nor any of the team he bought over from Lucas knew anything about telecoms. You had to go about three levels down from Simpson before you found anyone who could stand up at an industry meeting and not look like a fool.
The next big deal was for Marconi to buy a big ATM equipment manufacturer in the US named FORE Systems. They had shares inflated by the bubble. We also had shares inflated by the bubble. But we had to pay cash because our shares could not be traded in the US at that time. Oops. The deal meant that the four founders, who had most of the intellectual capital, now had FU Money as well. So they said FU. Eventually Simpson managed to promote someone else from Fore to be CTO of Marconi. But he wasn't one of the guys who got FU Money, and there was a reason for that. His idea of a technical strategy was to get the engineers to build a bigger, faster box than the last one.
Orders dried up. The company almost went bust. I got laid off with a whole bunch of others, and Marconi is now a shadow of its previous self.
Managers don't need to be technical wizards, but they do need to have a decent understanding of what the engineers are talking about. Middle PHBs can sometimes get by, especially if they are not directly managing techies. But if the guys in charge of strategy cannot tell which way the wind is blowing in your industry then get out while the getting is good.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Rhoda's doorman got a $20,000,000 severance? Damn, MTM is generous!
It can be a complete pain having a manager who insists on being technical instead of managing.
I would rather have someone who knows how to manage
Find funky gifts
MBA holding UNIX admin here, so I've got some knowledge of the problem. To manage a project effectively, you have to have some knowledge of the space in which the project lives. I'm not talking line-of-code specificity here, but (for instance) a web project cannot be properly managed by a guy whose most recent experience is in managing a COBOL app on a VAX. They're different, in important ways.
You've got two issues here.
1) For some reason, people who have done "computer stuff" seem to think that the skills commute to whatever platform they're working with. You would almost NEVER hear someone contradict a CPA with only a passing knowledge of GAAP, but it happens all the time in IT. I happen to think this is a function of the lack of respect for IT functions, but, well, whatever.
2) There's an ongoing problem with managerial bandwidth. One of the current management theories (which change biweekly) is "the thumbtack." Generically speaking, the structure of companies used to be pyramid-shaped, with several people reporting to the CEO, several people reporting to each of the several C*Os, and so on.
A thumbtack-ed company pares down the number of middle managers, so that the top and middle levels of the pyramid shrink, and it's shaped more like a thumbtack (pointy end up). The number of employees in the base generally remains the same, but the managerial responsibilities of the remaining middle managers grow exponentially.
Obviously, you're shedding a fair number of expensive positions, but upper management is banking on the increased bandwidth of the manager class. The easily replaced managers can't complain, or they're gone.
What I, personally, think this theory misses is that availability of a manager != effective management. If someone's getting input from email, phone (cell and land), blackberry, IM, etc., how much of that information can they EFFECTIVELY process before they start missing things, and the project becomes undermanaged?
The CEO can't come down into the trenches, and the techies shouldn't be making the big, company-level decisions. There's a middle ground that is increasingly ignored at the expense of project efficiency.
It's the question of what comes between the CEO stating "I want a CRM system." and the programmers executing the technical requirements for that system. There's an entire array of important skills there that neither the CEO nor the techies should have, as they should be busy doing what they do best.
Personal opinion, of course.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
I pilot does not need to know how to build/fix an airplane - h/shee have talent in other areas...
If there is one thing I learned in the military, it is that you are not qualified to tell someone how to do their job unless you've done your job. People who are qualified to command troops in battle typically have been shot at and have shot people. People who have been trained to command, but haven't so much as fired a gun at a range are called officers. They're usually the first ones shot in a hot LZ, which is gods way of looking out for the enlisted man. (Little combat infantry humor there.)
The same holds to be very true in the technical world. A person with a MBA can push paper, balance spread sheets, and sign off on requests all day long, but to be more than just marginally effective they have to be able to speak the language. Otherwise, all they are capable of doing is transmitting deadline pressure from the top down, and piss-poor excuses from the bottom up.
No
Carly Fiorini
Depends. The QA department should be operating under the same set of release criteria, and if the most important thing is time to market then they should be testing under a much less strict set of criteria. One of the most ineffective QA people I have worked with was a guy who used to work for the military. He was absolutely meticulous and thorough, to a fault. The problem was, we weren't developing things that had to be tested to that level of detail. He had to work 3x as much as anyone else to get the same work done, and couldn't argue a point unless it was to the death. Nobody wanted to work with him, and he was completely ineffective. He was testing simple software like it was life-or-death.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
when was the last time Steve Jobs or Bill Gates actually wrote some programming code?
They stopped being computer geeks, and became business managers. What they know about technology is outdated, and the ideas they have are not based on modern technology, but the way they want modern technology to work. Engineers, developers, etc all try to make their vision of technology a reality.
Gates and Jobs stopped being Dilberts and turned into PHBs.
When Sculley and Amelio ran Apple, Apple was in for hard times by the very competitive PC industry. Apple got to the way it was, because of the way the Macintosh was designed and marketed. It was not designed right, and was marketed towards the creative content crowd, which was too small of a marketshare. Later on the Macintosh was redesigned as the PowerMac, which was a step in the right direction. Yet still, it needed to change and evolve with the times. The PowerMac clones gave customers what they wanted, but hurt Apple's sales. So when Jobs came back the clones went away, any product that was unprofitable went away (Laser Printers, Scanners, Newtons, etc), and the Macintosh was redesigned yet again with the G3 processor, the iMac, the iBook, B&W G3 Mac, etc. After that, the Macintosh had the right design and cntinued with the G4 and G5 Macs, with blunders along the way like the G4 Cube. Anyway Apple needed more income and based on the popularity of the MP3 players and Napster, and File Sharing, the iPod and iTunes were invented to generate more income. These ideas did not come from technological advances, but from listening to what customers wanted. Something the previous Apple management refused to do. The previous Apple management rather made the product and then told the public to buy it, ignoring their needs.
A good marketing strategy is to listen to the customer's needs, and then develop products around them. Customers wanted a cheaper Macintosh, so the Macintosh Mini was developed, for example. Apple had never done this before, and the cheapest Macintosh was the iMac series, but still not cheap enough for the die hard PC zealots who refused to switch and kept buying those $500USD boxes.
Only by catering to the customer's needs, can a company survive. There is nothing to do with technology, unless it is designing that technology to suit the customers' needs.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
It had been touched by about 20 coders each of which where told to look for speed, one of whom wrote his masters theasis on query optimization. None of them new shit about performance tuning.
I got an order of magnitude performance increase (10x as many rows per second total load time).
It had six outer joins to six instances of the company table (that alone made the backend build a temp table). Where finishing all the per row number crunching on the client before even firing off the row specific query.
I could have got a little more performance by turning the data collection into a stored procedure, but not enough to justify taking another week to work out the details (the client was Access, returning a recordset in a field of the primary recordset was not possible).
The first guy to write this code should have taken three days to understand what an index is and how to read a query plan before starting.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
A friend of mine is a plant manager at a multi-billion pharmaceutical and chemical company (Solvay Pharma) and he knows jack-shizz about Chemistry or medicine. Yet he is a great manager. Managers don't need to know what exactly is going on. They just have to lead people. Amdn be good at management.
Slashdot 1|0 Productivity
In short no, explaining a technical issues to a manager or supervisor is painful at best.
- They don't understand things
- they end up asking people
- Ultimatly the 'other' person makes the decision for them
- They don't understand why they are delays etc for technical reasons.
Oghh the list goes on, shoot me now!
"WebTV: bringing the Internet into the shallow end of the gene pool since 1995" - Martin Bishop
Manager Profile scientist managing scientist
They go to scientific meetings with secretaries, lined personal to vacacional centers at least once per month.
They rewrite articles written by collaborators in which their name will never appear.
The money of your project will be used for their own personal projects
They will be invited by their firends to conference BUT his friend will pay everything so in exchange they will invite them with all expenses payed.
They will use laboratories for their own research
If you disagree with them, suddenly your equipment will be assigned to other researcher.
MAY I continue....
THE worst thing you can do is to hired a technical guy for a manager position.
No, but it is amazing to me. The business press is a huge effort that it is almost completely uninformed on technical matters. Scary, because that means that most readers don't know enough not to be impressed by what's written. As business becomes more complicated technically, more and more companies are operating with partial blindness.
But Microsoft was able to build a monopoly because of their technological ability. They bought DOS from Seattle Computer Products, but if they didn't know what to do with it thereafter, they would have been sunk. They still had to maintain it and fix bugs.
Likewise, when Apple released Macintosh, they totally dropped the ball, and it wasn't due to Microsoft being a "monopoly". Despite the technical superiority of the Macintosh front-end, Apple failed to deliver the solutions people wanted, such as including a hard drive on the original Macintosh because Steve Jobs thought they made too much noise. This completely cut out a lot of serious business market share. Even today, Macintosh ships with a one-button mouse, which is quite idiotic for serious engineering CAD development. Sun workstations shipped mice with three buttons! Any counter-explanation by Apple fan-boys is usually juvenile, and regardless of what they say, history is history.
Apple also had problems with MacWrite. Given its head start and superior graphics, MacWrite should have become the de facto standard. It's not. Why? Technical ability of its competitors. If the competitors had been complete idiots, there is no way anybody would have plunked down even $50 for their products.
Microsoft was also extremely lucky when Texas-based Compaq was able to reverse engineer the IBM, thus launching the clone market.
Which leads to two important questions:
Question #1: If Seattle Computer Products was able to hack out a DOS that could suitably be morphed into the IBM PC, why weren't there other people who also could have tried and created a competitor to DOS to run on the IBM PC? There would have been scores of people technically capable, whether in California (think UC Berkeley, which produced Steve Wozniak AND Unix co-inventor Ken Thompson, and later grad student Bill Joy of Sun, and even Perl's Larry Wall), Massachussetts (think MIT) or even Texas (think Texas Instruments). It's not like it was a secret; Microsoft distributed Xenix. Indeed, the only people who would attempt would be Andy Tanenbaum in 1987, BSD386 folks in 1992, and following in Tanenbaum's footsteps, Linus Torvalds in that technology mecca epicenter hub known as
Question #2: IBM's PC was purposefully made from the off-the-shelf components to keep it low cost. Nothing in the PC was a secret except for the BIOS. Therefore, if it was so easy to create a computer (and a clunky one at that), why didn't other companies jump into the fray to unseat the IBM PC DOS, just as IBM had done to Apple's OS. Actually they did -- remember the Timex Sinclair, Commodore 64, the Amiga, the Tandy TRS-80, AT&T's and HP's forays, or the Atari ST line? All failed. Microsoft wasn't a monopoy at the time, and any one of those computers could have provided the real alternative.
It's fallacy to believe that Microsoft won by bullying alone. They had to develop a momentum and base before they could get to that point. They had to unseat the Apple II as a business alternative, and then continued to beat Macintosh, and ultimately dwarfed Macintosh with Windows 95. You could say, "Well they had IBM behind them." But then one also wonders why IBM failed so miserably with OS/2.
It wasn't due to Microsoft's monopoly. Their unsavory business practices were a component in their success, but not the sole reason.
Amen to that. I've made a mini career out of stepping into troubled situations and fixing them. The last one I did had spent over $30M on useless third-party software licenses, deals, and consultants, to try to stitch together some sort of application framework that they could sell. Net net of all that was exactly zero. It all had to go, every last bit of it.
There's a lot of crap out there. It's hard to figure out whether it's crap or not before you really get into it, even if you know what you're doing. It's especially hard if you're a PHB or even an educated PHB. And some of it isn't even crap, it's just the wrong tool for the job.
Here's a true story: our company had an ongoing task of moving and translating data between systems. Some PHB reasoned, based on his latest issue of EE Times: "We need an ETL tool!" So he ran out and bought an ETL tool for $200,000, and sent a half dozen people out of the building to train for a month.
Problem is, it's never the same two systems, and it's never done more than once. Oops! An ETL tool is the worst possible choice for the job. Custom Perl scripts would work better. And did.
As far as I know, the $200,000 ETL tool is still on the shelf where the PHB put it, before we kicked his sorry ass out of the company.
Hmm, I think the sales guy was trying to tell the customer that it's no big whoop to fix something that the customer wants fixed. The sales guy is deliberately minimizing the importance of this to keep the issue under control. So, he's minimizing what the coders do as well, in order to make his point. What would you have him do instead, make a Federal case out of it?
"Oh, well, goodness, we'll just consult one of our Senior Programming Architects about that, Mr. Customer. I'm sure with his vast knowledge of the computer sciences, he'll be able to straighten this glitch right out! Oh, wait a minute, look, we have Chester Nerdbrain sitting right here, one of our finest Senior Programming Architects. Chester, take your finger out of your nose and explain to Mr. Customer, here, how easy it is to change this prompt."
Not quite as smooth, especially when Chester trips over his chair, drops a permanent marker in the customer's coffee, and otherwise betrays symptoms of nervousness that anyone who does not normally spend his whole life in front of customers is prone to display.
I like the sales guy's approach, myself. I'm not offended at being called a "C coding monkey." Call me anything you want, just pay me.
able to tell between a photocopier and a paper shredder
7-8-9-10-0
End users are not really technical. Sales people deal with these people day in and day out. The Techies are great at making the product the way they see fit, not the way the end user needs it to work. Technical managers in my experience seem to do less discovery in the clients process and work flow. The outcome is a lame barely sufficient product set. Tech managers should listen to their sales staff more often. Bridge the gap!
Just an everyday guy....nothing special
Gerstner has an engineering degree from Dartmouth and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. The Harvard MBA and various honorary degrees are less relevant. Just because he's most famous as a bean counter rather than for technical work is no reason to compare him to the sugar water salesman at Apple.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Fast forward ten years and the same ones will have been burned a few times from comaptability problems between the latest and the greatest, many have had had the bleeding edge move faster than their (or their company's) chequebooks, and also either become overwhelmed by the number and associated effort of shiney things to upgrade or underwhelemed by some more sensible IT person's (with say in the matter) unwillingness to let the latest and greatest pass.
The key difference between a Programmer and a Senior Programmer is that one of them is Mexican.
My management is decidedly non-technical.
I am confident that my management got us through the tough times.
I feel that my management does listen and likes to support the technical staff whenever possible.
Admittedly, I have disagreed with my management at times. But in the end, I have seen the wisdom of my management.
On the flip side, I've worked for tech-saavy management, and at times, they've sucked at being good managers. They let their tech egos drive decisions.
In the end, what makes good management is plain old good management. And it's hard to find good management AND good technnical skills. But it's not as hard to find good management with good technnical sense.
Here's a good way to test whether HP is a successful company: Ask yourself, if you were holding HP stock right now, would you decide to sell it?
I would. Selling ink for $8,000 a gallon is a very unstable situation that occurs because of an unusual market phenomenon. There is no security in it at all.
HP is not using a sustainable business model any longer. It is depending on the intimidation of people who are getting started with new technology.
I refill all my Canon cartridges. If Canon, for example, decided to be the first one to actually sell an honest product, and encourage refilling, HP's business would collapse overnight.
Someday soon, ink will sell for reasonable prices again, and HP's unreasonable profitability from ink will be gone.
In your experience, can managers with little technical knowledge successfully run a technically-oriented company?
... Just ask Junior.
No
I don't believe that what makes a manager good is whether they are technical or not. I've had non-technical managers in the past who were excellent managers and great people to work for. The key was their willingness to learn and their ability to be honest and say 'I don't know what you're talking about' when they didn't. Socrates was once deemed the wisest man alive because he knew that he knew nothing.
Some of the same qualities that make a non-technical manager good also apply to tehcnical managers. Know what you don't know and don't pretend that you do! I hate listening to people who hold very senior technical positions, and half the time what comes out of their mouth is pure BS.
The way things are structured now in my little part of the world is that we have many "technical" managers, but unfortunately they all tend to be the types who will not admit that they don't know something. This leads to a lot of BS'ing. When you're superiors are like this, it tends to filter down to the ranks. Advancing in your career ends up being about your ability to BS others and hacking things together to make it work (even though it's held together by spit and paper under the covers).
There's no real "gurus" in my area. No one with a sense of coding aesthetic. No one I can go to to learn from. This is despite being surrounded by quote-unquote technical people. As someone who's earlier on in his career (at about 5 years), I find this extremely depressing.
The best places I've worked are the ones where people enjoy what they do and want their enthusiasm to brush off on others. More importantly, the fact that everyone has their own specific talents -- both technical and non-technical -- tends to be much more recognized in these type of work environments.
When your job is about corporate ladder climbing and getting as much exposure as possible to your boss's boss, and boss's boss's boss, it doesn't matter how technical or non-technical the management structure is. It's still going to be a crummy place to work.
One final note in regards to Gerstner ... Did Gerstner bring IBM from the brink of ruin in the early 90's? IMHO, no. This is a nice fairy-tale that IBM likes to tell its employees. The reality is, a lot of companies were doing poorly in the early 90's. Then the DOT-com bubble came along, and IBM managed to ride the wave, like everyone else. That's the reality of it. Gerstner got lucky by being the CEO during the same time the internet explosion happened, that's all.
I was working at IBM research in Yorktown when Gerstner came in. One of the first things he did was a closed video talk for us. And the first thing he said was that IBM would immediately start sharing patent royalties with the actual inventors of the patent. Wild cheering spontaneously broke out, and what had been a clinging climate of fear began immediately to disperse.
Before Gerstner we IBM scientists used to have a quiet saying among each other: "They pay us to be experts, not to be listened to". With Gerstner we felt we actually were being listened to.
Since then I've worked at other shops that were run by non-technical types. In other all such cases the experience was somewhat miserable. You always had the feeling that upper management had their minds made up before you talked to them, and that they never actually listened.
Seen it, been there.. Those ( the first post ) are the qualifications that make or break a company (IMHO ) Nothing much more to say - yes, lower level management needs some technical skills but asking if a manager can use Project, Excel or Visio or whatever is a wrong question. Besides - the secrataries do that and better than any untrained person can.
My management has just enough knowledge to attempt the usual debunking
but thinks everyone is trying to snow him over. He micromanages everything
and won't accept no for an answer even when advised that the costs
for outweigh the budgetary constraints.
I have sat in on meetings and watched him pledge life and limb for a project
and never listen to a single flailing cry of our team. I can hear the
downward spire of credibility in the air now.
It's a sinking ship I would rather not find myself aboard at the moment.
How do you say that this just isn't very helpful input, and in fact is counter-productive?
...can in fact be very successful, but usually because they understand their limitations, and function in a largely administrative manner. They are more technocratic and practical rather than "idea" people.
I worked at a firm that hired some rather less than exemplary PHBs with not only a complete lack of technical clue, but no concept of legal issues (related to software licensing mostly) and a callous disregard for the opinions of those who were best suited to properly and honestly advise them. They were frankly, imbeciles.
I think the problem is not the managers themselves but the whole rank culture. Pun intended but serious nonetheless.
There are two issues at play here:
As far as I can see, the problem is that those most qualified to decide are also most qualified to do, and while their attention is focussed on the doing, the foxes declare themselves guardians of the henhouse.
I have a tech startup operation, and it is never going to IPO, because it is never going to fall into the hands of the foxes. I know that I am not good at sales or administration. I will almost certainly hire people to fulfil these roles, but I will also certainly have trouble keeping them in a world where mine is the only company that daily reminds them that they are servants, not rulers. It is not in their interests to put my company's interests ahead of their own. They don't do this even when they are treated as rulers. Neither do IT people, in my experience. We're just quieter in our larceny.
If you forget that all hope is lost. - Strousup
A non-techie CEO or Manager could work for some tech companies, but it depends upon how technical the company is. If the company is actually a big holding company that owns a lot of smaller high tech firms, it would probably work to have a non-technical manager. The CEO would be far enough removed from any day to day technical decisions where ignorance could do real damage. They could focus on selling the company and coordinating the operations at a large scale where people management and organization is far more important that making technical decisions.
If the company is smaller, then the CEO should be an ex-techie and be very familiar with how the company operates, it customers and it's products.
Bringing in someone like Fionia ( or whatever her name was ) to manage a computer company was a bad ideal. Bringing someone like her on to manage a company that builds heavy metal with millions of lines of code to control all the moving parts, would be such a bad ideal, it would never even be considered.
CEOs are more leaders than managers. There is a clear distinction between them, although people in similar position tend to do both in varying degrees.
A leader listens to advices from various sources (both trusted and not so trusted), and makes a decision for the whole group based on experience and vision.
Managers manage personnel performance and alloted resources, not make major technical decisions. Technical advices should be from tech leaders, and managers only need to make decisions based on the effect the tech decisions have to workers.
- Don't try to make decisions about a subject before you understand it. Or to a company. That means that for the first few weeks or months - depending on the number of people who report to you - you do nothing but watch what is happening, get out and see what is going on, and ask lots of questions so that you do understand. Even if you're familiar with the particular business, every company runs in a different fashion, and your way of doing things might not work. You want to make decisions in such a way that people follow what you tell them because they respect you as being fair and reasonable even if they do not agree with your decision.
- Ask each person who reports to you two questions: "Do you have everything you need to do your job properly?" and "Is there anything I can do to help you be able to do your job properly?" and be willing to listen and take them seriously.
- If you have to solve a problem and do not know how, you find out the people who are most impacted by the problem (the ones who have to suffer with the results of the solution) and you give them the problem, explaining that since they have to live with the solution, you'll let them decide how to fix the problem, then you implement the solution they give you.
- Basically you have to be willing to trust your people in that presumably they are professionals and are willing to do a good job if you will allow them to do so.
- You have to be consistent, and people will try to put their efforts toward what they think you want most. If you talk about product quality once a day but gripe about schedule slippage ten times a day, quality is not going to improve.
- You also have to guarantee immunity for bad news. That means you have to be willing to allow anyone to come to you about anything wrong without fear of reprisal. It also means you're willing to correct problems even to the extent of protecting the people who tell you about problems against your boss finding out about the person doing so.
Having been both a working manager in a non-programming position and a non-managing programmer, I've seen it from both sides. Good managers make a place a wonderful place to work. Bad managers make a place into a living hell. Do your job right as a manager and people hardly even notice you're there, until you're not there and they realize how much you do for them.Paul Robinson
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
You said, "Microsoft has always been extremely aggressive against competitors..."
That's true, and no one should think they know the extent of the aggressiveness. I came to that conclusion after trying to document some of the aggression in my article, Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going.
What made DOS dominant in the later years? Microsoft deliberately allowed piracy. That's my conclusion and opinion after considerable study of the matter.
Microsoft created a 2-tier market that squeezed out competitors. You could buy DOS for a lot of money. Then, you could buy DOS for very little money, if you would accept a pirated version. Products that competed honestly in the market could not sell cheaper than the widely pirated DOS, and they disappeared. (Most people cannot look at a manual and see that it has obviously been reproduced from a photocopied original rather than typesetting; most people did not know the copies were pirated.)
One day in the years of DOS, I got irritated at this, and decided to protest. They've closed the loophole now, but back then you could call Microsoft and get the phone number of their legal department. I told the woman that answered that my closest 10 distributors were all selling pirated copies of DOS. The woman was very interested. She sounded young and neither of us realized the implications of what we were doing. Once she had accepted my complaint, the information was inside the company, and they had to go ahead with a court case. I participated as a witness against the most open of the pirates, and Microsoft won.
If you were a dealer back then, you either felt that you were taking a huge risk selling illegal copies of DOS, or you could not compete with other resellers. So, it made sense that Microsoft and I were temporarily on the same side of an issue.
Microsoft does the same thing with Microsoft Office, in my opinion. I sold computers only to businesses, strictly legally. But once a friend asked me for help with buying a computer, and we went to what seemed to be the best retail seller in town. We bought a nice computer, and then the salesman offered me Microsoft Office for $50. So, there was Corel, trying to sell Word Perfect for a reasonable price, and they were being undercut by Microsoft's 2-tier market.
Nothing has changed, apparently. I got perhaps 100 spam email messages today, and a large number of them offer Windows XP Professional and Microsoft Office for under a hundred dollars. It's not a big secret. (Anyone who is not getting enough Microsoft software piracy offers, just post your email address somewhere on the internet.)
It's not hard to know who is pirating, because each message contains information about how to find the seller. For example, "Totally legal Microsoft for a tenth of the price WINDOWS X'P Pro + OFFICE X.P Pro - 80 Dollars Contact: http://cork.perfect-oemcds.biz." Microsoft Office is dominant because Microsoft apparently takes a relaxed attitude toward stopping pirates.
That's the later years. What made Microsoft dominant in the early years? Here are my observations and conclusions and opinions:
Back then, IBM executives did not know how to type. They had secretaries for that. IBM was then on the way down. (In later years it was resurrected.) IBM executives did not want to create a mess in their brains by remembering actual technical facts. That's a short way of depicting the IBM culture back then.
IBM executives went to see the then-dominant OS seller Digital Research to arrange an OS for the IBM PC. When they arrived the DR CEO had decided to fly his private plane instead, and his wife was less than respectful. Then the executives went to Microsoft, and Microsoft licensed DOS rather than selling it. Back then the IBM PC was not a product an IBM manager wanted on his resume. A product that would only be used by secretaries probably didn't seem important.
I have seen more instanely stupid decisions by unqualified 'TOP MANAGEMENT" who had clue 0 than you can shake a stick at. Now the business crowd will shout 'But business people are trained to run the universal business, reguardless of the widget". Well then Mr. Business suit, "Computer People are trained to run computers universally reguardless of the system" BUT I see business people getting real hard cherry picking people at interview "Oh, you havn't got 20 years experience in this obscure product, but you say you can adapt... NEXT!" Turn about (only makes sense). If you haven't got the university degree in whatever the business sells, then no job for you either. Engineering company? Engineering Degree! Computer software company? Computer Science degree! Biomedical company? Biomedical Degree! The Dilbert cartoon describes how sad-sacks get hired on and screw things up badly. The sad reality is that these people simply have no business being in that business. Time to give them the heave-ho, and keep them out. If these companies fail, they fail because they made bad product, rather than on the stupid decisions of the incompetent!
The second point is that if you look at Microsoft's performance in the Basic market (and Basic was the de-facto standard programming language on microcomputers in those days), Microsoft was already dominant by the late 1970s (Microsoft Basic was considered the 'industry standard'). This dominance was without any help from IBM, and is almost exactly what Microsoft replicated later in the word processing and spreadsheet markets (with Word and Excel), as well as operating systems (with MS Windows).
What really set Gates apart from most of his competitors in those days was that he understood the importance of volume and becoming the de-facto standard, where as a lot of other companies (e.g. Lotus) were more concerned with short-term profitability. In fact, Lotus was a much more profitable company than Microsoft until mis-steps on Macintosh and MS Windows led to the demise of 1-2-3. The difference is that Lotus didn't put its enormous profit to good use in terms of entering new markets, allowed 'inferior' products like Excel to undercut it in terms of price, etc. If Lotus had followed a Microsoft-like business strategy, it would almost certainly still be the world's number one software company.
My dad is the owner and director of an Indonesian computer company (really, I am serious) http://infotech.co.id/ , that has existed for 13 years. His company is pretty small, yet all Indonesian TV stations and some Indian TV stations rely on his software, Gen21. There are people there who are well-versed in Java, Oracle, Powerbuilder, C, VC++, VB, etc., etc. If I do say so myself, it is a highly successful company. But get this: My Dad writes none of the programs, and the only languages he knows are COBOL and FORTRAN.
From this example, it becomes apparent that to manage a successful company, one needs good business skills more than one needs technical skills. In fact, my mom, who works at the same company, has resolved to earn $2 million this year.
How technical is Steve Jobs?
How technical is Bill Gates?
Compare and contrast. Who has more taste? Who has more market share? etc...
I work for a telco/ISP in a fairly rural area. The manager here does not have a technical bone in her body. There are only 6 employees, not including her. The 6 of us run the entire telephone and Internet companies ourselves with no help from the boss. She barely knows how to open an attachment in an email and knows even less about how the phone system works (and she's been here for nearly 30 years). I have no idea how she got the job as she only has a 10th grade education and no business training whatsoever. Her day basically consists of this:
1) Come in hours before everyone else
2) Sit around with the phone guys listening to what they have to say before they go out and start their day
3) Go sit on a conference call, but don't say anything - she would sound stupid if she did
4) Stand in her doorway and "oversee" what we are doing. Though I think she is just trying to figure out WHAT we are doing.
5) Wait for any of the girls in the office to say something funny or interesting and then get up and leave her office to catch the last sentence of the funny story - laugh and go back into her office
6) Get "involved" in the company when it requires no help or thought - ie. We need a new stapler and since that is something she understands, she will spend 45 minutes calling around asking about staplers
7) Get "concerned" over stuff that has nothing to do with the company - "you shoes are wet, your making the carpet wet."
8) Laugh off anything that is seriously affecting the company - "ME: one of the core routers is down, I gotta get over there fast" "Her: Oh, hahaha...[walks back into her office]"
9) Try to find something useful to do, but fail
10) Go on company trips to telephone/technology conferences for several days, ring up huge bill for the company to pay, then contribute nothing, nor tell any of us about anything that went on at these conferences
11) Do whatever possible NOT to make a decision (we employees have learned not to make her choose between 2 solutions. We weigh out the pro's and con's and then give her a recommendation to which she always reply's "Ok, I think that make sense," while trying to sound like she has really thought about it).
12) Try to give coaching tips on good work to which we all laugh and ignore
13) Make up stupid rules to make her feel superior - we can't take lunches (outside of the office), we can't go for a cigarette etc. These are all illegal of course, and I do them anyway, with a smile on my face.
14) Take money to the bank for the day but then do grocery / clothes shopping while being paid by the company. Make up some excuse why she was gone so long.
This woman knows nothing about running a company. She is completely in the dark about every facet of what goes on. When she is gone on holidays (like every day isn't a holiday for her), the company runs a lot smoother because we can do all of our work without being interrupted. If she disappeared for 6 months, the company would run smooth as silk, but if one of us was gone, it wouldn't be a smooth ride at all. Sooo, it is possible for an utter moron with no technical ability to run a technology company. It just requires that a competent staff will be there to hold the managers hand each and every day.
This story is by no means an exaggeration. It is much more humorous (read: SAD) in real life.
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.