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?

Comments

Essentials

[ackthpt]

The ideal CEO:

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.

Re:Essentials

[Floody]

Amen to that.

My worst employers have been those who were not only technically incompetent but incapable of realizing their limitations.

The best? Those with enough technical skills, background or knowledge to realize that (a) things are not always as they appear and (b) doing things the Right Way has long-term benefits that overshadow the "quick fix." 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.

Re:Essentials

[lampajoo]

What goes along with that though is being really good at spotting liars. a non-technical CEO can have smoke blown up his/her ass really easy by techies trying to get their way. If you're going to be delegating and taking ideas from more knowledgeable people you have to have a good bullshit meter.

from that movie The Aquatic Life: "I don't know what you just said but I know it's bullshit."

Re:Essentials

[Baron of Greymatter]

The real-world CEO:

* 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? :-D

* 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.

Re:Essentials

[jadavis]

doing things the Right Way has long-term benefits that overshadow the "quick fix."

That's an oversimplification. Sometimes the right way is the quick fix and not the Right Way. If having something fast is more important than having something correct, the right way is the quick fix.

Sometimes a product can be developed perfectly, and totally miss its opportunity to be useful. This is a crucial aspect of communication between management and labor.

If it needs to be done next tuesday and won't be worth a penny on wednesday, you'll do lots of things that aren't "The Right Way". You'll use MS Access, Visual Basic, bailing wire, and duct tape if you have to. And if you've got a good boss you'll know the situation and understand how "Right" you should do it, because he'll tell you.

MacGuyver (sp?) has built many useful things escaping from drug dealers, and none of them would pass the scrutiny of a good QA dept.

Well

[Neil Blender]

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.

What is being managed?

[QMO]

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.

Managing is more about people then tech, IMO.

[KhaZ]

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.

And let's not forget....

[GillBates0]

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.

Why Not?

[Jeff Hornby]

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.

Best quality in a manager?

[Anonymous Coward]

Best quality these days?

Ability to speak Hindi or Mandarin.

Re:A manager is a manager is a manager...

[tom's a-cold]

...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.

This is the kind of thing that business schools tell their MBA students, and it's not true. I have seen people with good generic management skills fail dismally because of their inability to comprehend what they were managing. Without understanding what the job entails, a manager cannot establish appropriate metrics to measure progress, or know who's bullshitting. These are the key inputs to effective management decision making.

If you are managing a technical effort, you have to have technical understanding at a level far better than "basic." Otherwise you're reduced to beancounting and trying to find an authoritative source within the organization who will tell you what's going on without dragging their own agenda into it. Managers are usually not good at knowing who to listen to unless they have some means of reality-checking.

Senior executives (C-level and maybe their direct reports) are a different story, since they're not as close to the workface. But the idea that there's a generic skill that managers have that is independent of underlying subject matter is pernicious and contrary to real-life experience.

Having said that, technical skills on their own are not sufficient to make you an effective manager. Leadership is a whole different thing. So is strategy.

Re:It depends on the salesman.

[PhilipMatarese]

Your slashdot ID is "Willie", your email is "Fred Garvin", and you signed the post "Todd".

Who are you? Really?

Managing Geeks' Egos

[Anonymous Coward]

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 worst are technical semi-competents

[EmbeddedJanitor]

... you know the ones... they **think** they know technical stuff and maybe they did ten years ago. They hear buzzwords and throw them around. They want to be making decisions because not doing so makes them feel not in control. They are influential and the brown-nosers listen to them, so they build momentum with bad ideas that need to be reversed and replaced with good ideas.

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.

The Jobs-Sculley story turned on it's head

[X]

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.