Slashdot Mirror
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?
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!
The real-world CEO:
:-D
* Has no vision at all. He takes his marching orders from the Board of Directors, who represent the stockholders.
* Surrounds himself with yes-men who tell him what he wants to hear.
* Listens? To what? He's the CEO and makes all the important decisions.
* Rewards himself when someone comes up with a good idea. His employees' performance is supposed to make him look good.
* Mandates sycophancy.
* Juggles the books if necessary to increase the stock proce. His job, by law, is to maximize shareholder value. Period.
* Is above criticism. He's the boss, after all. He wouldn't have achieved his position by being a complete f**k-up, would he?
* Loves the squabbles between his managers. Makes him look that much better. He'll just fire one of them (probably the technical guy).
* Has his golden parachute ready when the s#!t hits the fan. The layoffs and the collapse of the company are his successor's problem. Meanwhile, he leaves with a $20,000,000 severance package.
Microsoft's VP of Customer Service is Helen Waite. If you are having problems with their products go to Helen Waite.
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.
Actually, I'm a System Architect which means I'm the guy who is kind of the "voice" of our software engineering group. I also have some input and stakeholding in every product that we do. I promote interoperability between our individual products and also drive special projects to create reusable components that go into multiple products.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Geeks are easily distracted by shiny things.
Maybe new-school geeks, but old-school geeks value durability, supportability and sustainability over shiny new toys.
I think this is analogous to the differences between "new money" (rich) and "old money" (wealthy).
I see your point but on that note...
FR2 did no field representation at all and placed the burden on the technical guys as our manning requirements were based off of specific duties. You could remove FR2 completely from the loop and just let the technical guys do the whole thing themselves and everyone would have been better served (including the technical group). Nothing is more frustrating then FR2 ordering 2 USR 33.6 modems for a build out when he was actually supposed to order 2 CSU/DSUs. That is a huge price difference. Instead of requoting the original department for the right equipment he would move things around from somewhere, would rob Peter to pay Paul, or fluff or pad the next request to make up for it. It is a moot point now but he used to determine what IP addresses to use by pinging a few, if no response, he figured it must not be in use. How about when one department ordered 15 USB scanners I'm sorry, but I do not find those methods of doing your job should be rewarded.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
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.
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'
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.