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Can a Manager Be a Techie and Survive?
theodp writes "Some say that good managers should not be technical at all. Over at Computerworld, 'C.J. Kelly' takes a contrarian position, arguing that managers should keep their hands on the technology. The ability to tell the difference between fiction and reality, says Kelly, is priceless." From the article: "If you don't know the difference between fiction and reality, you've got a problem. By being technically informed while managing people and projects, no one can blow smoke up my skirt. I can tell the difference between a lame excuse for a delay and a legitimate reason why something can't be done." Where do you fall on this issue? Is it nice to be able to flim-flam the boss once in a while? Or is the valuable input of a boss with a technical background worth the occasional all-nighter?
Of course it's "nice to be able to flim-flam the boss once in a while," but that doesn't make them a good manager. I'm sure that the their boss wouldn't see it that way if they knew what was going down.
Does this even need to be said?
I mean, come on! How much easier the lives of techies would be if their boss was one of them, if he would actually understand?
Mmmmmm... um, I will be back later.
I think it depends on what kind of background the boss has, specifically. If they were formerly a member of your development group, then they would likely make a good manager. If they came from another product group, it could be disastrous. For example, there's nothing more annoying than someone offering unqualified technical solutions that they encountered in their former world that don't apply to yours...
In smaller shops, IT Managers absolutely have to have the technical knowledge because without it stuff won't get done - small IT Manager are expected to help carry the workload whilst mentoring the people under them. Even if your not in IT management, having some technical knowledge is good to keep the IT Manager in check - I've seen IT Managers who couldn't configure a RAID array, but they knew the lingo well enough to keep the business at arms length and slowly spiral the department into the toilet.
At the end of the day, they pay me for my skills as a programmer. I could blow "smoke" up all there ass's and they wouldn't know. Problem is though, that is never the problem. The problem is they always believe as managers they are greater. And knowing programming 101 won't help them make informed decisions or decide best practice. As a manager they need to learn to listen, trust and RESPECT there workers.
moo
Who says that? Some people say that if you shove your fingers up your nose and blow, you'll increase your IQ. Some people say
Can we just stop with the "some people say
If you're a tech manager and you lack the technical knowledge, how will you be able to determine which approach is viable or even realistic?
And don't tell me that you'd rely upon your staff. How do you know if your staff is any more technically proficient than you are? What happens when two people on your staff have contradicting approaches to a situation? Do you just flip a coin? Or do you go with the one that's been kissing your ass the best in the past week?
If you're a manager, it means that you have the responsibility to understand BOTH aspects. The technology and the business. That's why you're paid more. That's why you were hired.
If you can't handle both, then turn the job over to someone who can and find yourself a job more appropriate to your skill set.
Do we really need another article on this when Dilbert cartoons have been around for so long?
You've heard the expression about people "being promoted to the level of their own incompetence"? Well, in order to be a good manager, you should be good at managing AND at the tech involved in what you're managing - but unfortunately, if you're THAT good, you're probably either working at either a much higher level or attempting your own start-up. This leaves people who are only good at one or the other, and sticking someone who can't manage in a mangement position would be even worse than using someone who is able to manage a team even if they only have cursory knowledge of what the team is doing.
I have worked for both types of Mgrs: Tech Mgrs and Mgrs of Tech. Tbe second tend to better because they stay out of development and allow their staffs to do the work. A Tech Mgr beleives they are right and will commit to schedules that generally not reasonable nor possible.
A leader should be more experienced than the people he or she leads. This does not mean the leader should know about or be concerned with the smaller details, but he should have a broad enough background to comprehend the individual tasks he is organizing people to do. A manager is not there to tell people what to do, he is there to organize the division of labour. If a manager was cloned ten times he should be able to replace the people he organizes after learning the specifics of each task he would otherwise be unable to cover as one person. A manager is the frontal lobe; He has to do the higher level strategizing, but not get distracted with the reflexes and autonomous functions. However, he should still know what every part is doing. He should not be disconnected. A common misconception is that a manager capable of "lower level" tasks may become distracted or tend to micromanage. This is not the case; indeed, many can attest that managers who like to "get involved" tend to know even less about the task that they are interfering with, than managers that take a "hands off" approach.
I remember hearing this story from some senior engineers I worked with about 20 years ago. I'm pretty sure that it's true.
They were all working hard down at Cape Canaveral getting ready to launch a satellite (an old HS-376). The boss came by and asked how things were going and one of the guys said that they were stuck on a problem and needed some parts. The boss eagerly got involved because this was something that he knew he could handle. They sent him to Radio Shack (Titusville) and had him ask for some polarized resistors. He took it in stride and did not get too upset when he came back (red faced) without them. It must have been very humbling for him.
JSL
I think it's great if a manager keeps up on technology, but once you're a manager, don't step on your workers' job responsibilities. I once had a manager who would constantly say things like "When I was doing it, I always did it this way. Try that." Yeah, that's nice and all that, but when you were doing it, the kernel was at level 2.0.13. Things have changed enough that the way you used to do it no longer works. It got old pretty quick.
Is it nice to be able to flim-flam the boss once in a while?
I'm sorry, but the fact that anyone would even consider this paints a very sad picture of society.
If my manager doesn't know the technology that I'm using, he will inevitably agree to something that cannot be done (either impossible or not feasible). Haven't we all had bosses come down and dish out a nearly impossible task that sounds simple when he explains it, but really isn't? When that happens, a few things can happen: a) you get stuck doing it anyway, putting other projects behind schedule b) you fail to do it and look bad (and your boss is insulated from it: "I thought he could do it!") or worse.
I don't expect my bosses to know how to program Python, but they at least have to know what the technology is, how it works, and preferably at least how to read/interpret it.
Of course, in smaller teams, your manager is probably coding with you. Not every group can have a hands-off manager. However, if this is the case, the manager does need to ensure his role is maintained as manager, and not simply a developer. Managers need to insulate their team from stupid ideas, demands, and pet projects from higher levels of management.
Best of all, a manager that really does know the underlying technology will protect his job better. He might not have to program, but he could if he wanted to. Then he is telling the truth when he tells a manager that the "Project was possible, we just didn't have the talent for it."
Ideally managers should be very blunt, too, but that's just a personal preference. Where I work now, for instance, the managers are all-but-silent except during your yearly review. They then present a binder (not just a folder...) of your performance through the year. You may have sucked for 8 months, but they won't tell you til that review, and by then it is probably too late. I'd rather know that I suck sooner than later. Tech-savy managers could make that happen easier.
Loves coding and loves working with databases.
Incompetent managers can cause dilbertesque levels of insanity in technology just as much as anywhere else. I've seen managers so incompetent that they have led multimillion dollar projects straight into the ground through sheer ineptitude.
I recall one 100 million dollar plus project I was brought in on where a manager believed the vendor when they said you didn't need a single desktop technician to migrate tens of thousands of desktops. Needless to say that manager lost their job and the vender was sued for millions.
The manager needs to know enough to know what's needed for the department to do it's job, to know what to ask for it from venders and upper management. I've seen an it manager approve money for expensive inkjets because they like the pictures without leaving any money in the budget to replace a five year old server on it's last legs. I shouldn't have to explain to a manager that tape drives really do cost much and that a failed unit really needs replaced /now/!
Upper Management needs someone that can make that kind of decision correctly, they rely heavily on management's opinions for purchasing. The user base needs someone that isn't going to be snowed by a vendor with a dog and pony show. The techs need someone that knows what tools they need to do their job.
The job of management is to be an abstraction layer that interfaces between workers and upper management. They need to know enough about the job being done by their employees to do that.
A manager should be informed, and stay that way. Sure its nice to blow smoke up someone's skirt, as you say, and possibly more. Putting that closed-door office to good use is always a fun afternoon. But that's not what we're paid for, is it? If we just want to get by with standard pay and an HMO, a boss without expertise will suffice, but if we want to be a part of a successful, thriving business, we need all the expertise we can get. People skills are only gravy on top of the real issue at hand for a manager: knowing what needs to be done, and who can do it. Being technicaly proficient helps you to stay on top of your projects, and ensures that you know exactly what your employees need to get done, and in what order. It reduces inefficiencies due to miscommunication, and it increases the amount that your employees trust you. Your technical abilities are nothing but a benifit for you and your company.
The issue isn't knowledge of technology. Certainly, more is better.
The issue is personal. As it's said, the more someone knows, the more they realize they don't know. If that were universally the case, we'd never have stupid management decisions.
Instead, many people learn just enough to be dangerous, and then promulgate a potentially erroneous view with a vigor that overcomes all competing options. The cause is either 1) a lack of desire to learn more, 2) a lack of realization there is more to know, or 3) a personal stake, be it pride or otherwise.
The ComputerWorld article seems to be black and white; knowledge is good or bad. But like everything else, the true answer depends entirely on the makeup of the person wielding it.
I've been managed by non-technical managers and technically-aware managers, and also been a technically-aware manager myself for a little while.
It's a double edged sword. Non-technical managers might not understand the importance of technical details/problems, but technical managers might end up micromanaging. Personally I believe it all comes down to trust (and hence personality). The best managers are those that are technically competent but trust their team to make the correct judgements without the managers input. The worst are managers that are technically competent but want to make every decision for the team. Engineers *need* to have creative input and make decisions in order to be happy in their roles. Non-technical managers are in-between - they are forced to trust their team, but might not understand the pros and cons of important technical decisions.
Like it or not, those "difficult to quantise" aspects of running a technical project (such as personality) can make or break it. Surviving as a techie manager depends 100% on your personality. Put your trust in your team.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
I'll stand up. I have a masters in computer science. I read slashdot. I'm a manager. I'd say it helps me a lot in my daily work to have the same mindset as the developers and architects I manage. Of course, most of my guys could out-code me any day of the week. Luckily, it's not a competition. I'm glad their java-fu is better than mine. I use my background knowledge of developing to ask the right questions and find the right answers, based on their skills.
By being technically informed while managing people and projects, no one can blow smoke up my skirt. I can tell the difference between a lame excuse for a delay and a legitimate reason why something can't be done. That ability is priceless.
If your people blows smoke up your ass then you need to work on your management skills. Regardless that you can detect their lame excuses - if they feel the need to give a lame excuse then it's not only them that's doing a poor job - you are as well.
Hah! You are kidding right? My last boss was incapable of setting his own Mickey Mouse watch. Yet he was making all the key decisions. He started out as an employee and through a bit of back stabbing and sniping managed to eventually work his way up to MD. Of course, the best thing is the company is on the slide right now and he doesn't realise it. The developers keep stalling him on the nextGen product he thinks they are going to produce whereas in reality they are treading water on their salaries until some other jobs show up. I'm so tempted to name the company but I'm not drunk enough yet ;)
how 'with it' is that!
As a messenger years back I watched two high end video techs snow a room full of ad agency suits at $400 an hour while editing a toy commerical.
One kept saying: "I've got 14", and the other would reply from behind the control desk "I've got 15". At one point I grinned at them as this had been 30 minutes of downtime that shouldn't have been billable. They grinned back as they knew I didn't have any where near the authority, or motivation, to mention it to the suits. It went on for over an hour.
OT? sort of I admit.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
And both have their place. It's nice to have a manager with technical know-how when they can truly act as another person in your workgroup, in essence increasing the number of people trying to fix a problem.
It's also nice to have a manager that trusts their employees and will fight in the management trenches leaving their employees free to actually do the work.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
My network manager is a techie. Great at coming up with solutions and knows the technology better then myself, the network engineer. The problem is he does little to no actual "management" and a lot of big picture items fall through the cracks. There is no one to look at what we have coming down big picture and we have a lot of knee jerk reactions because of this.
Our tech support supervisor is not a techie. He is a complete idiot. He manages everything and nothing gets done without his approval or oversight. He promises technology solutions that do not exist or are not within our capabilities (network or space requirements). If it can not be done, he tries to safe himself by making the network team look bad like we dropped the ball and could not deliver.
Overall? This is the first place I've ever been where the tech support manager has more pull then the network manager. If the tech support supervisor has users reporting a slowdown with some web application and thinks the switch is the bottleneck, he will request the network team add a second switch (even though he has no knowledge or concept of how our network is running or the difference between a switch or a hub or what type of bandwidth we have), we have to add another switch because he wants it. Well sure enough, I already know the application server is dogging because it does not have anough ram or it running on a loaded VM server, my input does not matter, I have to do it no questions asked, very frustrating.
I don't know what is worse, 100% techie or 0% techie, I thing they both suck and one of each is even worse.
A good manager has to be a good leader first and foremost. A non technical manager will have a very difficult time earning respect among techies. Conversely, techies will eagerly follow someone who they perceive as an expert in technical matters.
Managers who can't lead are useless and should be outsourced to India.
After re-reading the article, some things pop out that don't seem quite right about this story. For one, it is chockablock with generalizations, banalities, and has a ring of inauthenticity: No specific technologies are mentioned save firewalling and VPN.
The writer has spare time to teach after pulling "all-nighters"? Puh-leeze.
If anyone writes to mscjkelly@yahoo.com, please post your impression, 'kay?
Women who worry that Anyone will "blow smoke up [her] skirt" are misguided. I think the brain is the region someone smart would protect...
Or, maybe I'm just burnt out and jealous.
Every time I see one of these management articles/questions on Slashdot, I wonder from which perspective many posters are commenting. If each poster was tagged "have been in management" or "have never been in management", I think that would make for very interesting reading...
Disclaimer: have been in management (goodbye karma)
The non-technical managers feel threatened by managers that have technical know-how. And they can use their considerable social skills to brand that know-how as a disadvanage, as a distraction to the essential task of management, which they see as making financial decisions and communication.
I have experienced this ostracism, and while it can be dealt with, it is definitely something a techie manager has to keep in mind when dealing with the other non-so-clued managers. It is a "weakness" which can easily negate any advantage derived from greater and deeper technical insight.
It is a talent that is more appropriate to an entrapraneur than a manager in my opinion.
I feel if you don't know your particular field as a manager then you're just a PHB, and probably buy everything Microsoft and Dell tell you to.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
and I can say he does it quite well. The important thing for me is that a manager every so often understands that certain problems can not be easily overcome - heck, some problems are underestimated. A good manager will guide you to the right path and tell you to watch out for such problems.
I was brought in by a small web design and development company to refine their methodology and process while increasing the overall quality of the work. The owner is essentially a sales person and has no knowledge of the technology beyond (often false) sales sound bites. This has completely undermined almost all my work as the owner makes commitments to clients that are unrealistic given the scope and budget of a given project and as a result client expectations are consistently unmet.
I believe anyone who is in a position to discuss a project with the client should, at a minimum, know the technology to the point where they have a realistic understanding of the cost and time frame of a project and changes to that project.
Now because of the difficulties my company is facing the owner is clamoring to begin using and purchasing templates, outsourcing more of our coding overseas, spending less time understanding what the clients want and beginning production almost immediately. Because he has no understanding of the technology I have had a difficult time convincing him of the value of slowing down the process, understanding client expectations before production, and coding with standards from the ground up.
A personal example of how a lack of technical knowledge can kill a project: the owner oversaw the outsourcing and development of a application using SQL Server 2005 that was to be hosted on one of our shared servers despite that we run 2000 and do not have any 2005 licenses, oops.
Having worked my way up through the ranks to management and seen both non-technical and technical managers, I'd have to say that managers with a technical background and are keeping their skills or knowledge (at least) current are better than many of non-technical managers. As was stated in a previous post above it all depends on whether the technical manager has a head for the business side of things, and vice-versa. If the non-technical manager is at least reading journals, studying trends in the market, and listening to input from multiple sources on and off their own technical team they can be very effective managers. The exact opposite of that is a technical manager that may not have a strong business head, but is at least doing his/her homework and working with other management colleagues to develop their business understanding.
I will say that this is a pretty silly argument, and that the ability to work with people of multiple personalities, common sense and a good work ethic makes a good manager regardless of their technical expertise. The role of a manager is to provide strategic direction based on needs, mentoring of employees, conflict resolution, and an avenue for the employees that work for said manager to relay concerns to upper management. Yes, it's nice if they can pitch in and help get the technical work done, but I don't believe that it is imperative that they have the same or similar skills to those they are managing. Dilbert provides an example of the stereotypical worst case scenario and is meant to be humorous, but it's not representative to the whole of IT.
If you're going to be a "technical" manager, for crying out loud stay current! Whatever you do, don't force it and be half-assed... If it comes naturally to you, do it. If not, maybe you should think about that MBA and become a "senior" manager.
Who did what now?
A Technical Manager, such as a project manager, must know a lot about technology and use it actively in practice, otherwise they are just wasting the programmers's time by asking stupid questions and giving bad directions. A General Manager in an IT business need not have much grasp of technical matters except excellent appreciation of the concepts involved (e.g. they ought to know about information systems), but I would still recommend some weekend coding even to a general manager, especially if they participate in hiring decisions.
I personally am a holder of a BSc(Hons) in Computer Science and I am now studying towards an MSc in Management, while I work as an Analyst Programmer on European Union projects and contribute to open-source. It's not all bad: Techies can certainly become good managers if they try, but I guess it all depends on why one decided to go to business school.
Even at the CEO level, an attempt to run a high-tech company in a way PepsiCo is being run is disastrous: witness Apple under MBA types. A techie with a managerial clue (Jobs), OTOH, was pretty good.
Obviously, Yes! However, how many techies have the necessary organisation and human skill to climb up the corporate ladder?
Why is this even a question? Lower Management *must* understand whatever they are managing in order to be effective. That means if they are managing technology (hardware, software, whatever...), they must understand it to some degree. Otherwise they become a pointy-haired-boss incarnate. I manage a group of Engineers at a software company and I consider staying current with what they are working on part of my job. Managers who simply create gantt charts and manage budgets and schedules typically have worse results than those who understand the technology. Those managers spend too much time focusing on the wrong things. At the middle and senior levels, things are different. VP's and CEO's need to rely on managers that report to them to make the right technology decisions.
I am employed in a large international IT company, which much to my satisfaction requires managers to have technical knowledge. If you don't know the difference between TCP and IP, don't expect to even be interviewed for a manager position here.
The manager should be sufficiently aware of the organization's culture to know that ahead of time.
It isn't necessary for him to do any of the actual coding. But he needs to be able to explain to the other managers why, with the current people / money / time / equipment / deadlines / other projects, the IT team will not be able to hit the deadline of the new project.
Then it gets into negotiating with the other managers for more people / money / equipment
The manager's job is to understand the business and the technology sufficiently well that he is able to communicate the business's IT requirements to the coders and provide them with the resources necessary to achieve those requirements in the time allocated.
It's a simple definition, but it's been useful for me. It also allows you to see where the "bad" managers have problems.
#1. They don't understand the business and the team gets stress for delivering tech that isn't appropriate.
#2. They don't understand the tech and over-promise what can be delivered.
#3. They don't understand the business or the tech.
#4. They don't communicate the requirements to the coders.
#5. They don't provide the resources the coders need.
etc.
It's difficult to fail if your manager is competent at each of those steps. But not impossible. There can still be personal issues that cause conflicts/problems.
But the chance of failure goes up dramatically with each step that the manager fails.
Being technical is great and all for managers that proceed up through the ranks, but what happens when a good (and technical) manager changes jobs? What I'm getting at is that (supposedly) a good manager can manage people in various industries and many do switch entirely. I had a manager once that had proceeded through the ranks and knew all the technical aspects of the systems he and his staff managed, but once he was hired in as our manager (same industry - health care) it was entirely different systems and OSes.
I'd say that first year of working with him sucked. Yeah, I worked with him and not for him it seemed as he shadowed my every move as much as he could afford to. He believed that he needed to know all the technical stuff. And he did learn a big chunk of it never all of it (as should be expected).
I will just say, nobody should have to spend hours, days, weeks and basically a never-ending chunk of their time teaching their bosses technical stuff.
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." - Shepard Book Quoting Malcolm Reynolds
I can't imagine anyone thinking that someone managing techies doesn't need to have technical skills. Of course they need to have technical skills. A large part of management is decision making, and the better informed a person is, the better the decisions. Tech managers need to have technical knowledge to be effective.
And it's not just in the technical field, in any field. Retail managers need to understand the products sold in their store, bank managers need to have a clue about finance, etc.
While i was at a Big-5 consulting firm, a Senior Manager allotted two weeks for "conversion" of HTML files to ASP. No, i'm not talking about refactoring or anything, all that had to be done was renaming of the file extension and a wrapper tag. Overbilling or stupidity? You decide. I suspect it would have happened even on a fixed fee project.
I have 2 HUGE problems as a manager who was a tech.
.33 women!) too often.
1) I side with my "guys" (who are
2) I have a nagging feeling I could "do that better" than they're doing it.
Sounds fun, or funny but it's not. It's a pain in the ass. It literally triples my stress levels.
There is no doubt in my mind that being a Sys Admin was a MUCH easier job.
This
I believe that it would be more ideal to have someone who is both a technical expert AND a wonderful manager as a company leader. Are there those who do not think so?
I hazard that most people realize that not all managers make great technical people, and not all technical people make good managers. In many cases, neither has an aspirations of being the other.
For many years, it was a case that one didn't have to be both, but it seems that now the unemployed lines are full of misdirected former managers (who made unreasonable demand after unreasonable demand), and lots of technical gurus who do not know how to lead, all of whom are expecting to be paid the same as someone with both the technical and leadership skills (or are successful in one and just sound enough in the other.) There will always be the technically adept person who thinks he would be a better manager, and that manager who thinks he knows more about the capability of the technology than the person who built it; this situation lends itself to the popularity of Dilbert. However, it sometimes also lends itself to the stagnation of many smaller companies, as the wheel of productivity never quite turns the way that it should. It creates a situation where folks are butting heads, the managers cannot lead properly because they do not know their own product line, and the technical staff are so wrapped up in being "smarter" than the managerial component (not understanding that smart comes in many different flavours, and technical knowledge is not the end-all) and--ahem--apparently trying to find ways of getting out of work to pursue their own interests, so the fingers are not working with the hands, it seems.
In companies where you have these two separate positions, but both understand their place in the system and understand each other's goals (better technology/more profit/faster production), and try to reach some thought-out compromise, the dichotomy works rather well. Unfortunately, when communication breaks down and this understanding is not always reached, and both sides are too wrapped up in ego to compromise, you end up with the situation described above. Jobs are lost, money isn't made. No good.
A bit off-topic, but I think it relates: it should also be understood the manager will likely be paid much more than those who are the technical experts (not always, though...I expect several responses of single-case anecdotes where this isn't true.) This will be a source of friction for some. In the case where one is both a technical expert and a really, really good leader, I suspect that their initiative, expertise, and good people skills will lead them to success regardless, and they will be paid well. For those who are only one or the other, their bottom line won't be nearly as fruitful, and their salaries will probably reflect that.
The tides are changing, and you will find that graduates of engineering and computer science schools are expected to have the capability to become both the expert and the leader, and we will see the days where you could be "just the technical guy" and be paid comparably gone.
As an aside, someone who prefers their boss be ignorant just so they can be lazy is a bad worker. And shouldn't be surprised when one day their skills and usefulness have been surpassed by others, and they are without a job.
Both tech and non-tech scenarios of management just ape the traditional view, which is that management (as a distinct function to tech) is mandatory.
I'm afraid this is entirely wrong, and just a self-serving view created by the management "class".
Competent techs can organize themselves perfectly well without any imposed hierarchy --- in fact, this is probably a good definition of "competent". An unthinking directed tech slave is not really a competent tech in a true sense, because all tech work requires effective self-management if it is to be "good". (I guess it can also be "good" by sheer accident, but relying on repeat sheer accidents is not a good idea.)
This isn't a pie-in-the-sky view of the world either, although it's definitely unconventional. It stems from my experience in numerous companies (I'm freelance, so I see a lot of them) --- the best work comes from those tech teams that are self-managed from within, and not from those teams with managers who are not actually doing the tech work themselves.
I'm still trying to work out why this is so, but my working hypothesis at this time is the following: "if you're not doing the work, you're hindering it".
In any event, the conventional view is simply wrong.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
from back in the days of vacuum tubes, when the new guy would be sent to Supply with orders to pick up a Fallopian tube.
How exactly are we supposed to get bosses who are technically competent? Who hires the bosses? HR people and veeps. What do they know about hiring competent people? On average, somewhat less than a flea knows about special relativity. My favorite pointy-haired boss was an architectural engineer who was put in charge of a tv IT department because his degree had "engineer" in the title. He frequently commented that his engineering background gave him a special perspective on the television production engineers and computer tech's who worked under him. Inside of a year, almost all of his employees quit. Thereafter, he got promoted to head a new department, incorporating previously separate IT departments from all over the company. Incompetence rises to the top. There's no stopping it.
Can we just stop with the "some people say ..." crap?
To get rid of it entirely, you might need to stop watching Fox News...a common phrase used on their news.
This can really go two ways.
On one hand, if your manager has some technical knowledge, he's more likely to go to bat for you when upper management gets unreasonable with their demands. Ideally, he'd be able to understand the technical reasons for, say, a production delay - and translate that to management-ese for HIS boss. Having a manager who is hands-off enough to let you do your job, but still really interested in the workings of the things you're creating - heaven! Imagine a boss who sees in your work a particuliarly elegant solution to a problem, recognizes it for what it is, and commends you for it - without you having to explain it! These kinds of managers DO exist.
On the other hand, if you get a manager with an inflated opinion of his own (sparse) technical knowledge, you have a problem. This kind of guy ends up making long, irrelevent speeches in design meetings, imposing work methods that don't make sense for a project, and constantly second-guessing his subordinates' technical abilities. In the very worst cases, he will listen to an idea from you, give you ten reasons why your idea sucks, then quietly suggest it to everyone else in the office to make himself look good. Then, while you're off on vacation, he'll make a Grand Announcement that turns your suggestion into Policy, and when you get back everyone will be talking about how brilliant your boss is. It's threat management - you were a threat, he managed you! Sure bosses are allowed to do this, but it's a grand way of destroying employee relations.
Managers don't have to know everything, but they should have an in-depth understanding of the work their employees do. They need to acknowledge the limits of their practical technical abilities and defer to their employees when they are unsure. On the flip side, employees really need to respect managerial efforts to assist them on the technical side.
If your manager doesn't "get it", it's your responsibility to help him understand, and his responsibility to listen. Just keep in mind that your manager might actually be right!
Bad managers come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them have good technical knowledge, some don't. But a special place of contempt is reserved for the truly *clueless* manager. Those are usually of the non-technical sort.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Surely the basic fallacy here is that "techie" is a unidimensional attribute that you either have or you don't. In reality, no-one these days has up to date technical knowledge of every aspect of IT. Even if you take, say, web-based solutions, anyone who claims to be up to speed on all the relevant technology is lying or stupid. And if "manager" means more than "lead programmer", the chances are that the project as a whole involves more skills than any one member of the team - techie or not - has mastered.
It's obviously helpful if management know enough about the general area in which they are working to ask intelligent questions, but you really don't want the management arguing with the programmers over how to write the tightest loop.
Virtually serving coffee
Cooking, like development, requires a combination of knowledge, technical skill, and creativity. I've eaten at restaurants run by chefs, and at ones run by bean-counters. There's no prize for guessing where one gets the better dinner -- but the dinner is enough, if you're the one eating it.
From an outsiders perspective I'd say Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software ticks all of the boxes, e.g. "The Development Abstraction Layer". It's such a shame that they can't clone him on demand and ship him worldwide in 48 hours :(
All that said, I'm far from being the "techie" that I once was. Yes, in some technical topics, I could run circles around my people (not bragging here... just a fact), but in many others, they've got me beat--as they should. I'm not there to be the expert on every single technology we have, but to be the glue that brings it all together and serves it up to the rest of the company. This means I needs to "get it." I don't think it hurts that there are some areas in which my technical skill outweights theirs, though. Over time, their skills will come up as well.
I've read a lot of comments to this article from people basically saying that the IT Manager should basically stay completely away and let the IT staff make all the calls. Sorry... that's not the way it works. The line staff person isn't the one calling the big picture shots, no matter how much he or she knows. I've made decisions that, at first, seemed less than rational to my staff but, after some chat and a Q & A, they realized why I made a particular decision. If you have an IT Manager that's always making bad calls in your book, then you either really do have a bad manager, but the more likely explanation is that one or both of you lacks communications skills. If you're feeling frustrated, you need to be able to talk about it to get the "why" behind the decision. If the manager refuses to talk about decisions, he's not comunicating with his staff.
Enough said.
Scott
Is to keep your manager essentially from freaking out about the project. From experience, it's easier to tell a non-technical manager that a particular component will take more time (then you research how to get around a problem) than it is to tell a technical manager that you need to spend some time researching a problem. Technical managers often freak about their deadline, and will go hire some temp to try and "speed things up". Even worse, they'll try and second guess the engineer and feel that there's a "really simple way" to fix the problem. Technically-oriented managers almost NEVER can resist going either route when they start sweating about their job possibly being on the line. And usually, when they go either route, all they end up doing is fouling things up worse.
of course you cant be a manager, in circuit city all our manager does is play video games, "hey a customer needs you sir" "CANT YOU SEE IM KILLING PEOPLE IN GTA: VICE CITY STORIES"...."yes sir, ill just use Dave Chappelles presentation and do this *puffs out chest at customer* I MAM THE MANAGER!!"....on that note i wish i had his job.....=( i wanna play video games all day and get payed more =(
-Noc
One of the most difficult phases of my career was coming to the understanding that I, as a manager, was not responsible for determining how something was done or the technical purity/perfection of my subordinates work. I am a manager... I am not a implementer or designer. My job is to:
1) Determine the competence of those that I manage.
2) Rely on their judgment and expertise to solve the problem.
3) Assess the value of their solution against the needs of the customer and the company.
4) Provide them the resources and staff required to accomplish this solution.
5) Judge their performance based on the constraints that I have provided them.
Sadly enough... that's it. For my power I pay the price of letting younger, brighter staff tell me how my projects should be done. If you spend too much time second guessing your staff and telling them how you thing thinks should be done then you've failed. You *should* be paying attention to financial, competitive and political forces and dealing with them so your staff doesn't have to and can focus on doing their job.
I give a clear and accomplishable objective... you get it done.
That's how it should work.
Well, who are you managing? Are you manager of a marketing department? If so, it probably doesn't matter one way or another if you're able to turn on a computer. Are you manager of an engineering department? If so, one might wonder how you got there in the first place if you're not intimately familiar with that field of engineering. A good manager has to know the business that they do. They need to know when to push their team, and when to push back on other teams. If that manager's team happens to create technology, then that manager had better know everything involved in the creation of that technology so that they're able to make the calls for scheduling, and know when something is possible or not.
If someone is managing an IT department they better know the technology. Nothing worse than a manager that doesn't know thing one about IT saying something stupid that puts IT people in an impossible situation. If you don't know the technology, even a little, how can you ever hope to effectively manage it?
I work with computer simulation of structural engineering problems. I had two managers on my current (and first) work. The first was a 20-years experience engineer, who worked in pioneering jobs in simulation in many industries, mostly aeronautics. The second has never worked with simulation at all, and has no idea how it works.
The second is a lot better, because he listen to what other people say. Works goes a lot better, we can change things when we think we should, he knows when to call for help instead of thinking he can solve everything by himself (and that we should do the same).
The first, however, is a great work colleague, as long as he doesn't plan my activities and priorities.
They tell the students that there are aspects of running a company that are independant of what the company does. Which is true. But then somehow they conclude that you can run a business without really understanding the business/industry/product/tech. Same goes for management. It's really unbelievable.
Look, managers don't need to be technical, they just need to contact their nearest Microsoft salesman to ask which Microsoft solution is appropriate to their current business problem.
There are two ways to design an app - bottom up or top down, but most everyone agrees that no app can be 100% of either. It is a continuum, and the properly point of that continuum is dependent on the application being built. The same is true for management. If the department's work isn't extraordinarily technical, then why have a guy who knows assembly leave.
But I think what we have here is fear mongering from those that are currently leading without understanding the tech. Eventally, those who do know the tech and are in charge of implementing the plans get promoted. Therein you have a conflict. The don't-knows fight to keep control and not lose their jobs to the know-it-alls.
There is a caveat for the know it alls though, and that is micromagaging. Also, managing people is completely different from managing code bases. If you don't have good people skills, you will fail (as my last boss did - he couldn't manage but could program extremely well. A year later he lost his director status and was forced back into programming.)
I think that an extremely technical person can succeed, provided that he doesn't involve himself too much with details and has those inter-personal skillz.
I myself am in this situation. After programming for 10 years, I finally got appointed last week to the directorship for the department. I am replacing a person (who is moving laterally int he company) who did not have the same level of technical knowledge and would constantly confuse terms and could never get the verbiage right. This often created problems in his execution of inter-company contracts, where his contacts did not know how he was mis-using terms.
So there you have it. It is a mixed bag. It should be decided on an individual level and not a matter of common practice.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
As one poster says, who cares what "some people" say.
A technical manager isn't a good manager because he's not technical. He's a good manager because he trusts the other technical members on his team, and deflects "management" stuff from them, leaving them free to be technicians.
A techcnical manager, by definition, has to be technical in order to successfully serve as the wall between management and rank-and-file. If he can't understand what his people are doing, you'll be required to feed information to management, which gives a tacit line of communications between the workers and some higher level of management. A technical manager doesn't need to be a rock star, but they need to know what's going on and understand it sufficiently to be able to "translate" it to "Managerspeak", removing names from all the lackeys and putting his name and the name of his group, not the individual contributors.
I've had 3 good managers in my career. In one of those places, a manager was replaced later be someone who was not nearly as good. In all three cases, the common denominator wasn't that the manager wasn't technical; one wasn't, two were. The common trait was that they trusted that the people they hired knew their stuff, let them do what needed done without trying to micromanage or drive outside goals through it, and insulated us from the upper levels of management who wanted status updates, or timelines, or wanted to ask stupid questions. At my first job, when that manager left to be replaced by a less useful one (who was a much nicer guy, but a less effective manager), when I moved onto a document storage and retreival project, I got stuck dealing with umpteen different departments and representatives, all of whom had a stake in the project, none of whom I was able to address their concerns, since they were business level issues and concerns, not technical ones I was able to deal with.
So, the idea that good managers can't be technical is ridiculous. Anyone who's had more than one knows that a manager's technical inability has much less bearing on their ability to be a good manager than does their ability to assemble and trust their team of technicians.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
The only problem with a manager that's good at what the workers are doing is if the boss doesn't want to quit doing what he's good at. This is a problem because a manager has no attention to devote to work (being the person who filters useless distractions) and little time (having the full-time managing job and twice as many meetings as anybody else). So, no matter how good a techie the person is, the output is lousy, ill-considered, and never ready.
So the answer is really that a manager can't really be a techie, but a manager should be a former techie.
Also, a manager only needs a good approximation (but it can't be a bad approximation) of skill in the field. There's a level of skill where you can't solve a problem yourself, but you know whether it's fundamentally impossible, impractical, or just difficult, and that's ideal for a manager. (The worst thing is if the manager knows the problem can be solved, but nobody else on the team is good enough to solve it and the manager is too busy.)
Of course there's also the Peter Principle; there are plenty of cases of techies without any management skill at all promoted to management positions on the basis of seniority and great technical skill, such that they don't have the necessary skills for their actual job, are too valuable to let go or demote, and don't have the time to do the work they are better at than anyone else.
In Europe where managers and companies are like blood vessels and muscles, they can get away with it. In other so called countries, where the managers are hired years after the founding and strict hierarchy is worshipped, the managers can't be close to the technology.
A lie in the workplace, much more serious than telling someone that their hair doesn't look silly, is a dangerous place to tread.
The technical savvy or character judgement of your management should not be the factor that determines your integrity.
While it is important to have a manager that can "read" people, agreed, it is equally important to have technical people that you can trust. A manager, while he should be a good read of people, is there more so to be a leader and manage the direction of the company, and make sure his employees are in a position to work toward that. The ability to read a lie is important when it comes to negotiating contracts, dealing with purchasing, and speaking with customers; having solid contract-writers and lawyers are insurance in case that ability lapses. Exposing the lies of his employees should not be a skill that a manager must regularly exercise, but I admit that is only in an ideal world. Given this is not an ideal world, and given that the Slashdot poster of the article framed this in context of the collective Slashdot community, I will approach this more as advice for those who bridged their hands and got a knowing grin when they read that last line, and for those new managers who are dealing with folks who might be prone to doing this.
A worker who is willing to lie in order to have their own pursuits usually has questionable ethics (or has a really, really poor manager who they really cannot be honest with.) In your particular situation, that a person new to the company would falsely pinpoint another member of the team as holding up production (even if that other individual had a good, excused reason to do so), should be a red flag. (And further, that people new to a company commonly find it acceptable to "get out of Dodge" instead of putting in the necessary time when he is ultimately on a trial and there to prove that hiring him was a good decision, although certainly not a fireable offense, is a topic for another time.)
Although not too serious if the project really could wait, and it is true that everyone makes mistakes on occasion that may be forgiven, but he made the dangerous first step down a bad road of not being trustworthy and furthermore toward becoming a liability. An honest worker shouldn't dishonestly leverage other workers' situations, especially someone more junior to themselves, in order for them to achieve their own pursuits. Lying to your face, whether you have the ability to determine those lies or not, was even more offensive. That was disrespectful of you and to the junior gentleman. You are fortunate in that, considering he is still with you, he appears to have just made a mistake in judgment and has probably come to be a reliable worker. Everyone makes a mistake now and again, but there are consequences to those mistakes. He is fortunate that you are a good enough manager to understand that personal fulfillment is important, and will let him off to see his girlfriend, and that you would give him another chance, as you should have; perhaps he came from a company where this wasn't true, where one "has" to lie in order to not see the company die, and thus that was his reasoning for lying to your face.
I know it doesn't seem so this day in age where lies here and there seem to be the norm, but in the case of an engineer (which I suspect many people here on Slashdot are), integrity is often all that he has to give confidence to his customer or boss that he can competently complete the job, and that the risk in giving him a sum of money and time in which to do a job is worth it.
If you become someone who is known to lie for their own purposes, then you can't be surprised when your input means diddley squat to the people making the decisions. Or when you're jobless.
And when you have lied until your management are in the ninth circle of cluelessness, you cannot wonder why decisions that make absolutely no sense are being made, and some serious consequences (a complete wipe of the technical st
How come we never see articles like "Should a programmer manage the sales staff?" or "should a techie be promoted to manage the purchasing department?"
I'll bite... I'm in a IT shop doing consulting for data warehouses. I usually have to dig in deep to the technical work myself as we are simply short living breathing humans. My position is a manager.
What I find most difficult is keeping schedules on time when I'm doing technical work. It's easy to get lost in one issue after another, clients usually don't know what they want until you present what you've worked on, and they want changes. When I'm not responsible for a task I can usually put things into perspective and get my team to be mostly on time. When I'm on a technical task, I find a billion + one ways to push my own deadlines.
It's hard to draw the line between what is agreed upon, and what is required (us vs. client), and a "complete requirement study" is an illusion I've yet to see turn into reality.
I also find difficult to distinguish between "design" and "technical" work. What becomes the responsibility of the programmer, and what is the responsibility of the designer? My current interpretation is that design is focused on what the user wants and the required outcome of a program. More often than not I nitpick on designs & methodologies. I sometimes ask about implementation specifics (believe it or not, when you're dealing with 2 million+ records even a slightly misplaced linear loop of size N can kill run time) but I don't latch like a hawk on those details, and I don't have time to do it either.
It'd be nice to simply say to my team "this is what has to happen, make it happen". I find that without discussion, lots of whiteboard doodling and people sitting down on the same table with lots of food etc... only bad things will result. I also find that until I've talked my ass off and people have had their say and all opinions have been discussed (i.e. silence, notes have been taken, people start getting that zombie stare...) only then is a common objective agreed upon. E-mail discussions are open to too much interpretation. I actually find 5 minutes on the phone will save me hours and hours of back & forth through email.
What ends up happening is I manage to tangle myself in just about everything, usually I have to do this anyways during testing & acceptance as the users are demanding, and the people writing the cheque want to see you in the midst of things doing everything they want. However at the same time I'm more than happy when I can offload tasks to my team so I can go back to staring at my schedules and budget trying to balance both.
My team is mostly happy I think. We're usually under a great deal of client pressure and it's not something that's easily fended off. They deal with the clients too and the flak gets spread around. It does bring the team closer together in a us vs. them attitude, but at the same time we want to make them happy. Burnout I think is inevitable under these conditions but there's some nice downtime between projects that sometimes I let them just stay at home and do nothing (paid).
Just sharing some current experiences. I've yet to find a good balance and I don't think it'll happen any time soon. I think it's just a matter of time & experience, and those can't be rushed.
A funny anecdote, to be sure, but stupidity and ignorance are two very different things. You were probably just trying to be funny, and I am sure we all throw around the term "stupidity" on occasion when an absurd situation comes about, but just in case:
They may not have technical savvy when it comes to web apps, but I imagine that you wouldn't appreciate their (or my) calling you stupid because you presumably don't know information from any of the topics on which they or I happen to be an expert. (Of course, I happen to also have degree in computer science and engineering, so your example happens to be one on which I wouldn't have made the same mistake as your managment, but I also wouldn't have expected them to know the difference. But I can see myself in both your and their situations.)
In all seriousness, ask yourself why your management didn't feel that they can come to you for advice about what an appropriate amount of time would have been for the contract, before issuing the timeline. Is it because they sense that you feel you are "smarter" than they, and would try to demonstrate that to the detriment of sound business decisions? I hope not, and hope that you were just being funny above, because otherwise that attitude is very unfortunate and all too prevalent in the tech industry.
Or is it because they really do not care about their technical staff's input? I have worked at a company where this is true as well, as so I feel for you if this is the case.
Or was it just one of those short-notice things where they made a best-guess and happened to be wrong? Understandable, and fair.
So, the big question is, what did you do?
Is your situation one where you had to take two weeks to complete the project, less be accused of costing the company money (assuming per-hour pay)? In that case, I feel for you. Or were you able to complete the project that same day, and establish yourself as someone who can complete projects well ahead of time and to spec? This case, I hope was so.
Or did the technical staff laugh at their good fortune, and spend their days on Slashdot for two weeks before completing the project at the very last minute? In this case, that did no one any good.
I hope yours is a situation where you could go to your managment, and offer your expertise in completing the project that same day, and see what time frame they preferred. If their customer was buying into the two-week contract, your company might have lost some cash in per-hour billing by completing the project in 1/10 of the time, but you may have gained a longterm customer willing to pay more for better, "fast" service. And you would be the hero of everyone, establishing yourself as technically knowledgable and capable.
If it was the case of purposeful over-billing, I understand that pointing out their overestimation could be touchy, and I hope that isn't the case at all. Again, if it is, I feel for you.
That you say "I was at a Big-5 consulting firm" is interesting, and makes me even more curious of which of the above were true, if any. I am hoping that regardless, you moved on to a much better fitting situation.
...lots of good engineers turn into rubbish managers.
I guess these guys did it for the money, which really sucks.
A one word point on whether having managers with a technical background in a technology company is superior - Google
In my opinion, a manager need to know enough about what he's managing so that during the meetings he doesn't just have a glazed look on his face. He does not need to be a star programmer or technical genius - that's what he hires people for. But on the other hand, it takes some knowledge of the subject to make well-informed decisions.
Google: "All your data are belong to us."
I think the concept of "management skills" tends to be exaggerated. In fact, I'm not even sure it exists, beyond the notion that it's useful to have someone whose job it is to make sure everybody's actually contributing and stuff gets done on time. All the nonsense that we've seen and heard over the past 2 decades about "management training" and "the art of management" is a load of baloney. If you've got 5 engineers, you make the one with the most seniority the "manager" and I'm betting you get better results than if you bring in a newly minted MBA from one of the Ivies.
In fact, I'm thinking the biggest portion of the explosive growth of the "management class" in business is pretty much a scam. It always breaks my heart when I hear about some big outfit cutting 2500 line jobs and getting a big "attaboy" from Wall Street while an army of management pukes are signing leases on their new Beemers.
I'm lucky that I'm not in "the system" anymore, but I remember that whenever I used to see a new "manager", I'd invariably imagine them on a spit with an apple in their mouth. Is that too harsh?
You are welcome on my lawn.
A few months ago, my company hired a manager whose chief responsibility was to provide a liaison between the project management staff and the development teams. He also asked without prompting to make some contributions to coding standards and reviews. Because we had the need and desire to establish better processes, our VP readily agreed.
I interviewed this guy before we hired him. My only feedback: "Good management knowledge, but technical background is inconsistent." I gave him a thumbs-up, because I liked his approach to the business of producing software. Admittedly, though, there were many instances during the interview where his answer to a purely technical question made me cringe. A couple of quick examples:
Q: What's your preferred method of source control?
A: "Well, Visual Source Safe is the best out there right now."
Q: How would you address code readability and code quality issues?
A: "I like Hungarian Notation. Also, it's important that everybody use spaces instead of tabs."
I should probably point out that I don't work at Microsoft, and these answers were given in March of this year. Admittedly, both of his answers were based upon preference and experience, and I simply didn't like his taste. So I notified my boss of my objections and went on with life. And wouldn't you know, it wasn't long before his taste had become the law of the land, and it took months from real development to undo his bad input.
Here's the thing: I like working in a place where technical considerations always, ALWAYS win out over personal preference. Where this is the rule, there's no need to waste time quibbling over office politics. However, once you've introduced a manager into the organization that enjoys occasionally dabbling in the technical areas of software development, you've placed a political pandora's box right in the middle of the office.
In my situation, it will probably result in my self-enforced relocation to a new job. I'm too conceited and idealistic to work for a place that doesn't completely sell out on creating a winning development culture.
Being a techie won't make a good manager, but a good manager being a techie will probably result in a great manager. Its my personal belief that to be able to manage people well, you need to know what their job is, and what better way than to have done it yourself at one point? Your manager would then actually be able to manage a group without guessing and screwing everyone over. You may also be able to have an actual meaningful conversation with them without wasting your time by dumbing down the conversation to something they can understand. Not everyone is cut out to be a manager though, so don't be too quick to adopt any techie that wants to be one. :)
Mark Loeser
I've gone through 3 sets of management recently. All of them "manage by magazine" because they didn't know much of anything. All have wanted to be 100% Microsoft. No legacy, no Linux, no Solaris, just Windows. Why? Because it is what they read about. These dorks have wasted a couple of million dollars (and we're a smallish shop) on Microsoft shit. The current management at least has some background in multiple systems. Of course, we're still going towards 100% Microsoft. But with any luck, either (1) we will be able to retreat when the bovine excrement impacts the air moving device or (2) Windows may become reliable in our environment. I know some have said that they have a reliable Windows environment. We do not.
- The CEO of the national rail system, Hartmut Mehdorn, is a Mechanical Engineer.
- famously, Ron Sommer, the former CEO of Deutsche Telekom (think T-Mobile in the states) is a very gifted Mathematician.
- Dieter Zetsche, the CEO of Daimler Chrysler has a PhD in Engineering (hence "Dr. Z.").
- Ferdinan Piech, the head of Volkswagen, studied mechanical engineering in Zurich and is a grandson of the archetype of the German Engineer, Ferdinand Porsche (who, before anyone corrects me, was, arguably, Czech, Austrian or German).
- Speaking of which, the CEO of Porsche, Wendelin Wiedeking has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering.
The list continues for companies like the chemistry and pharma giant BASF (Jürgen Hambrecht, a chemist), SAP (all its founders, Hasso Plattner, Hans-Werner Hector, Klaus Tschira and Dietmar Hopp are either Physicists or Mathematicians), ThyssenKrupp (Ekkehard Schulz, a mining engineer), Robert Bosch Inc. (Hermann Scholl, an electrical engineer) and so on. Bear in mind we're not talking about people who directed their companies as startups like Microsoft or Apple, but CEOs of companies who already where global players before they joined (or were even born).So, although these people probably qualify more as "leaders" than as managers, it is obviously possible to be a good techie and run a big company at the same time.
Would you let a non-doctor be a hospital/ER manager?
Would you let someone who have no idea what a balance sheet is manage the accounting team?
Would you let a non engineer manage a team of design engineers working on the next high rise?
This shouldn't even be a question. That it is shows truly what is wrong with technology. Too many ignoramouses making decisions.
Would a bank hire a manager that worked at a shipping company that has never even had a bank account in his life? Why is it that managers in every field except technology expect that the manager is minimally competent in the part that they are managing? I have worked in a public company where the EVP in charge of IT, HR and PR had never had or used a computer in his life. Every expense over something trivial like $5000 had to be approved by someone that was proven to not know what any of it was and usually didn't even know what it was supposed to do. This is a man that had all his emails printed for him to read and he dictated them to a secretary that sent them in his name.
It makes sense for managers to come to IT the way they come to most other professions. You are competent in the basics of the profession, and then you move up to supervisory positions, work well at that, then become a manager. I understand that it is sometimes harder for that to happen in IT because the people drawn to the IT profession are not necessarily heavy in the traits that are valued in managers, but it is still a much better proposition than taking someone who has never owned or used a computer in his life and putting him in charge of IT for a company. I'd like to say that was unusual, but almost every large company I've worked for has had a level at the VP level that had never done anything on a computer other than word processing, or if they were an expert, maybe Power Point.
The question isn't whether a manager can be a techie and survive, the question is why can so many be non-technical and survive, when every other profession has a massive affinity for managers being competent workers in what they manage?
Learn to love Alaska
But it's rare. The trick is to earn the respect, as you said, and the only way for a non-technical person to do that is to admit up front that they have no idea what the techical aspects of the issue are. They then have to deal with the aspects that they do know -- making sure the techies don't get bogged down in meetings, keeping channels of communication open that are necessary, etc.
Although it's nice to have someone who understands what it is that you do, it's even more important to have someone who actually values your work. My current boss knows outright that he can't do my job, and he doesn't want to -- he gives me the requirements, and I give him results. This is infinately better than the IT contractor turned manager that I had to deal with in the past who kept telling me how to do my job, and he had no experience in dealing with the exact issues that I did, but he was convinced that he could do everyone's job better than them.
I'm not going to say that my boss isn't technical, as he is (physicist), but not in the type of work I do (software&databases). He screens me from the upper levels of management, and I give him the stuff he wants. It's a great environment, and he doesn't push stupid dress codes down my throat like the former IT consultant I had to deal with -- he's interested in the end results, and that's it.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Let's talk about the CEO for a minute. If you're saying that the CEO needs to have tech skills "in order to tell the difference betwen fiction and reality," then you are saying that no techie or middle manager below the CEO can be trusted to provide accurate information. If this is the case, then the CEO needs to re-think his staffing plan. Also, why is this limited to tech? Does the CEO also need to have a detailed understanding of marketing, accounting, human resources, law, etc., in order to avoid being lied to by those departments as well?
So: Direct supervisors of tech staff should have tech skills, but at some level above them in the organization, tech skills give way in importance to management and business skills.
This leads to question #2: What do you mean by survive? No doubt an ambitious manager would like to see a clear promotion path all the way up to the CEO level. I don't think tech skills are a liability to achieving this, but once you cross the threshold from supervisory to executive management, those tech skills are not worth much any more. If you have to spend a lot of energy maintaining the techie side of your brain, you are presumably detracting from the amount of time you can spend polishing your executive skills. And this makes you less promotable than someone without this distraction.
So: Can you survive? Yes, you can do very well as a supervisor of techies, but insisting on a robust set of tech skills may cost you as an executive.
-Graham
Personally, in my company, we have this middle IT manager whom appears to be a very genuine nice person, but whom is clearly making no effort at all to keep up with technology and as a result never provides any technical leadership. Sadly, he doesn't even provide any non-technical leadership either and simply regurgitates what his boss'es tell him down to his staff, and agrees with eveyrthing everyone says... unless it conflicts with what his boss's say.
Anyway, it's a sad situation to say the least, but the main point I wanted to make is that he has basically lost the restpect of his (30+) staff members, who still have to listen and do what he says (since after all it comes from higher up), but who can never count on him to make any decision of any sort.
The only (sort of) upside is that the team leaders under him have a lot of technical saavy and are generally quite competent, and by having a clueless manager above them, it allows them to exceed their own title limitations now and then and really take technical leadership of their own groups - which to the higher ups makes it look like this clueless manager is doing a good job.
The main point is, managers that do not keep themselves up to date with technlogy make technical leadership decisions out of fear, persuation and ignorance, and ultimately are always blindsided by the results, since they have no ability to foresee the potential results of 'their' decitions.
Anon
...i.e., somebody straddling the ladders of management and technical contribution at my current employer (and with a quarter-century work history of mostly-technical, sometimes-management), i do have a lot to say on this subject. My first attempt at saying it publically was at OSCON (the Open Source CONference) this summer -- you can see an independent third party's review-and-summary at , and a quicktime .MOV file of the original presentation is at (warning: 38 MBytes). I've since been refining and developing this presentation, but there's still no good online reference for it -- I guess I'll have to write an essay or something to cover the subject, unless I can get the presentation videotaped and archived.
To summarize: my point is that one way to be a great manager IS to be (at least) a technical peer of your reports, and in the presentation I highlight tactics and tips that have worked for me in this field. I do not mean to imply that a great manager might not also be quite apart from the daily reality of software development -- although, to a history buff like myself, it IS tempting to think of Caesar's last battle () and how his victory there just wouldn't have happened if he hadn't been up to firing up the troops' enthusiasm by wading into the fray and being at least as good with the gladium and pilum as the best of them. Being a genius for strategy and logistics is surely one great way to be a superb general, but -- at least in today's software development, just as in battles 2000 years ago -- being able, when needed, to "dip down" into tactics and hands-on down-and-dirty fighting (in SW development, that would be, first and foremost, those horrible, endlessly long debugging sessions:-) can't hurt...
Alex
As a manager, let me say the best manager is someone who does less "doing" and puts the focus on "leading". That's a hard thing for managers to come to grips with, especially those that have risen up to management "from the ranks". To be a manager, you must be willing to give up the day-to-day hands-on stuff, and leave that to your staff. To try to remain hands-on means you aren't doing your job as a manager. When you move into management, your job changes. It's a big thing to accept.
However, that does not mean that a manager shouldn't understand the technology. For example, I manage an infrastructure group at a Big-Ten University. There are about 25 staff who report under me, including AIX admins, Linux admins, Solaris admins, Windows admins, Novell admins, and storage admins. But I'm also RHCE, and I'll probably keep up my certification as long as I think I can. At the same time, I don't try to admin any of our Linux hosts. The certification means I understand how the technology works, but since I don't do any of the hands-on work, I can focus on how to apply that technology to larger problems. Sure, I can do the job, but doing the admin work isn't my job anymore. If a manager tries to remain hands-on, he/she gets too bogged down in the day-to-day, and you forget to look forwards into stuff you should do a year out.
In my case, to lead successfully, I've had to accept that I shouldn't do the hands-on anymore. Understand the level of your staff, and rely on them. Once I accepted that, I found I was a much more effective leader. I could free myself from the "where we are now" and focus on "where we should be". As a result, I've helped to change how we work. We do more "central" stuff for the organization, and have given up some things we used to do "just because we always did them." My folks are way more efficient now than we were a few years ago, and they're generally happier in what they do.
My $.02
It's of course a necessity that your boss has an idea of the technology he orders for the company. Nothing is more of a headache than working with useless tools because some clever marketing goon tricked your boss into buying them. And now YOU have to work with them because the marketing goon said that they're fool proof, so if you can't handle them, YOU are the fool.
On the other end of the annoyance spectrum is the boss that knows all, knows that he knows all and starts micromanaging you. Having the responsibility for a department but no room for decisions is an invitation to an ulcer.
The worst is the combo thereof (i.e. a boss without a clue but with the drive to tell you what to do). Run for your life, nothing's worse on your resume than a company that was driven into bankrupcy by IT with you as the one signing responsible for IT.
A good boss knows enough of technology to make responsible decisions, but keeps the execution in the hands of those that know how to handle it. It keeps his eyes on the big picture (that's where his eyes should be for a company to thrive), keeps his head free of minute technical problems and gives you room to make a good setup great.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It is almost universally accepted that your team manager is invariably your boss! Why should the manager be your boss? why can't a team have a 'team manager' as another team member. Think of a music band's manager. What does this person do? He/she works 'for' the team instead of the other way round. Can tech teams be the 'front men' (like the musicians) and their manager be relegated to the background? In this case, the manager need not be very technical at all. The 'team lead' (very much like the lead composer/singer of the band) must however be able to outcode everyone else in the team. Will this work?
Time and time again I see managers who aren't techies get caught up in the most insignificant issue because some other non-techie user didn't like the way something was done and decided to "tell the boss". This would then be followed by insignificant time-wasting meetings and writing long emails. Usually these things have turned into witch hunts, something like guilty unless you can prove your innocent and it's always been the non-techie managers who have never really understood what the real issues facing the dept were.
Anyway, my point is these managers who are non-techie and in control are dangerous to the work environment and to your career. There perception of you is based not on reality and what good job you're doing, they wouldn't have a clue if what you're doing is technically brilliant or not and they're more inclined to listen to people who can talk the management talk and not so much the tech talk. You'll see people get raises that know nothing technically but can talk the management 101 talk.
So my question is, can techies who are not good at controlling management expectation survive in developing their career? I think usually yes but I'm sure there are techies out there who get maligned because of ignorant managers stuck in perception and not reality.
not technical enough and the other dept members know it. More than a couple of them are willing to lie to him and it is getting tougher to dig our group out of the holes these liars create. The real shame is that we have already lost one good admin who couldn't tolerate it any longer. So the answer is pretty clear, and decent tech manager has to be at least a semi-decent tech.
Techies do not respect "managers" who are not at least as smart as they are. A manager who knows what questions to ask, and where to drill down, is a valuable asset to the organization and mentor to the team he leads. A manager that could, if need be, sit down at a keyboard, help the team debug, troubleshoot, brainstorm, and even code a problem that the team is struggling with is priceless. The team will follow him to the ends of the earth. As long as the manager isn't on an ego trip. Its about the team. This technical manager, with humility and servant-leadership doubles a team's value for the employer and the personal and professional development of the individuals that comprise it.
Doubt that? I am no "Apple Groupie" (I'm a *nix head), but you need to look no further than Steve Jobs for living proof of its power.
Thanks for listening.
G
Strange that the author seems to think that this is an all or nothing proposition. I've worked with technical managers and non-technical managers in the past and the biggest problem I have found is when non-technical managers try to make technical decisions. The biggest problem seems to be getting managers that know how to manage properly, not whether or not they are technically skilled.
There are different types of managers. A personel manager should be primarily focused on making sure that the technical people under him/her have what they require in order to do their jobs properly. There is also a place for a technical manager to be consulted on technical matters. I believe Cisco uses a form of management that provides two managers one for the business aspect and one for a technical aspect.
I really don't understand that question about being able to pull the wool over the eyes of a manager. Maybe if your working in a job that you hate and don't really like what you are doing this might be acceptable, but personally, hopefully this shouldn't be the norm for anyone, especially technical employees.
There are a number of reasons that many companies try to combine technical and non-technical managers into one person. Cost is one factor, but there are other reasons. Having a straight forward chain of command definately has its points, so that people only have one person to contact means that there will be no crossed wires where one manager is aware of something and the other isn't. Another reason to have just one managers is to provide opportunity for technical employees to move into management. The problem is that while a non-technical manager can go to his/her staff to find out what is required, for a technical manager without non-technical skills going to your technical employees to learn how to manage isn't the greatest idea in the world. After all, they likely don't have any more management skill than the said manager.
For my money, I would rather have a non-technical manager that knows how to set up a 401k and insurance forms for the people under him than to have a technical manager that because of his/her knowledge, thinks that they know better than I do how to get things done. While having a technically superior manager is nice, without the knowledge on how to properly manage they tend to be worthless. I'd rather have a manager that focuses on making sure I have the tools I need to do my job properly, thank you very much.
Basically, it comes down to whether a manager should be facilitating getting the job done or in the case of a technical manager doing the job themselves. As an employee, I would rather have a manager that is focused on spending their time making sure things are running smoothly and running interference with upper management so that I can get my job done. I don't think that they should be spending the majority of their time trying to keep up with technology to the point where they are better than I am at the job, that's the job of a technical lead, not a manager. I don't mind having a manager that is technical, so long as they are doing their management job first and not spending all their time trying to micromanage my technical skills. It's more important for the manager to ask how long and what I need to accomplish my task rather than to have someone tell me what I need and when I will have it done.
Just my two cents,
Lando
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
A good manager will be better with technical know-how. A bad manager won't be helped by it.
http://outcampaign.org/
My most memorable experience in engineering came upon joining a group of people, all very techie, who were a group of radio amateurs doing what they liked to do - namely - tinkering with RF.
It was a helluva "job", if you can call it that. "Lifestyle" was more the word for me.
It was the kind of thing you couldn't wait to get to the lab. I bought my house really close so I could minimize the time I had to do such nuisance things like eating or sleeping. All my "toys" were at the lab. The house was more like somewhere I went when I had to go to sleep. I would have gladly slept at the lab if there were somewhere to do it. Yeh - true-blue nerd. I was just as addicted to my RF toys as gamers are to games.
I had the best boss imaginable. A wizard of all things. That guy knew everything. But he just had one set of hands and that was a severe limition to him. I'd gladly be his hands if he would just show me how all this stuff worked. He had a really uncanny understanding of how stuff worked. I almost say I had religious experiences just talking to this guy. Its just the way he could explain fields and energy flows in such a graphical nature.
A big corporation bought us out one day.
They brought in their Masters of Business Degree managers, well schooled in the motivational theories and executive management skills, but didn't know much of a damn about how anything worked. Working for them was hell.
I soon found I anxiously awaited going-home time and weekends. I soon found why they called it "work". It wasn't fun anymore. It was hell.
I found myself surrounded by people making far more money than anyone I had ever seen make, yet they were completely ignorant of what we did. Only thing they seemed to care about were schedules and what software and tools we were going to be allowed to use. They set themselves up with altars and the rest of us now had the onus of paying homage to these altars, telling the holy priests of the altar what they wanted to hear, or we would be excommunicated as "not being a team player". The old paradigms of knowing what one was doing did not seem germane anymore. We were just supposed to "point and click". A lot of us had to go. I was financially insecure, so I hung on a bit longer and got laid off.
I see two schools of thought here. Whether one aligns himself with the ability to do or the ability to control.
I guess its like supplying water to a city....are you a pump or a valve?
Companies with an overabundance of creativity may want to throttle it back by hiring people to tell the creative people that they can't use the tools they like.
Newly forming companies may want to open the creativity spigots wide open and clear our all obstructions to generate the most possible throughput.
Its a cycle seen in all of nature - things get old, and are replaced with new things. Millions of seedlings are nourished by the rot of one big dead tree.
I am quite aware that quite a few very innovative companies arose from our "corpse".
I am of the belief that in younger growing companies, the manager is a mentor, that can do everything, yet due to time constraints, has to bring in more hands to do the work, and he personally mentors them.
In larger, more mature companies, which do not need the growth, the manager does not need to know what the people do. By now, its a commodity thing, he just has to look at numbers. Who can make the cheapest aspirin...
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Technology know how is not need to be a good manager, Knowing how to be a good manager is what's need to be a good manager.
I've seen em all, and what seperates the good from the bad has never had anything to do with how techi' they were.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Neither openbsd nor solaris use fileutils, which is a collection of gnu utils. Both use significantly nicer alternatives, because they are operating systems, not distros.
Just like kids, they are amusing but when you need to get something done, they're dead weight.
But I have worked for about 30 years in the biz. I've been the programmer, the manager, the executive, and I'm back to being something of a programmer and a manager and an architect.
It boggles me that so many of us describe managers as 'the other'. I am just a guy who was kinda good at the work, and kinda good at getting along with people, and kinda good at taking the lead when something needed doing. In a lot of cases, my having some skill in the biz caused projects to move much more expeditiously, because the doers didn't need to take 2 hours and 45 powerpoint slides to convince me that we needed a certain server configuration. My team members have, to my knowledge, usually regarded this as a Good Thing, as it shortened their day and simplified their lives.
Why would you NOT want a manager that can understand what you are trying to talk about? How could that make your life better? The examples discussed above, of micromanaging, are not criticisms of technical expretise, they are criticisms of micro managers. Of course it's better to have a tehcnically incompetent micro-managing boss (so you can frooze them), but that begs the question of whether a technically knowledgable -competent- boss is worse than a technically ignorant -competent- boss. Having had both, I will modestly suggest that a career is easier and more fun, when you and your team can talk on the same terms. Dontcha think Bill Gates or Linus Torvalds would be more satisfying to have as bosses than Jack Welch or (shudder) Oprah?
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
go fuck yourself retard. what a fucking turd. you want to be a fucking suit, sucking the bosses dick. what a homo.
Usually the best programmers get offered a chance to manage. When you've worked to be the best, it's not immediately obvious that you don't need to compete with the techies anymore, you need to work to get the best out of them.
There is a difference between "keeping up with" and understanding the problems and basic techniques. It also helps to have a wider technical base, so you can understand all the other technical issues.
This leads to successful delivery - the difficulty is to translate that into recognised success, as "just a good techie" (usually from managers competing with you - who presumably aren't)- is still seen as damning.
The only things I've found is getting close to the business and understanding their issues and constant good delivery - the b.......t merchants only get away with it for a year or so.
if "Faith" could be proved with facts - would it still be faith? So why does "Faith" try to present beliefs as fact? -
I think, on a deeper level, that this question misses the target somewhat; but I recognise that there is something about it in real life. The thing is, technically gifted people are quite often socially inept, and good management is very much about people skills. Let's face it, the 'actual work' that most managers do is something most people with any knowledge about Excel and Word would be able to handle.
However, a good manager knows that these things are not what he is there for. The most important task a manager has is LEADING people, ie. he has to be able to motivate, build morale, make things happen. In my view the following are essential traits:
- Trust: he must be able to create an atmosphere of trust. IOW, he must be trusted by his employees, and perhaps more importantly, he must be able to trust his employees. Thus, you don't betray people, and you always expect people to do their best - even if they miss their deadlines, you don't start from the assumption that they were lazy or stupid.
- Fairness: He must be fair in all his dealings. Rewards and punishments must be appropriate and prompt. This means that you don't dangle a carrot in front of people for ages - you give rewards immediately when an employee has done something good. Same thing with punishment - if somebody screws up or is lazy or something, you don't save it up, you wallop him there and then, and then you move on and let the sinner know (and feel) that as far as you are concerned that is all there is to it. It is rarely reasonable to turn back to past problems at review time.
- Appreciation: It is important that employees know they are valued. The workers, to put it that way, are the ones who produce the goods that the whole company benefits from. The CEOs, presidents, administrators, managers, sales people etc depend on the production team to do a good job, and that is worth bearing in mind, so show them respect. This also implies that you never give a salary increase less that the inflation rate every year! It may seem like a small thing, but if a person's salary doesn't at least follow inflation, it means that his real income is falling; and that tells any moderately bright person that he is not worth his upkeep. The result: that person will not be likely to show much loyalty and team spirit.
This is what a good manager is about, IMO. I think technical people are able to do that, but perhaps we have one handicap: we are often not too interested in person to person interaction.
When you got a real manager you got only happy shareholders, everyone else doesn't matter Typical symptoms:
The best way to get your company up again is to fire the most unproductive and expensive link : the manager...
...and don't get another one...
Knowledge and/or intelligence in a management position is never a bad thing for the organization
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I'm working for a university as researcher, so my "boss/manager" is a professor. In my case that means he hardly has any time for me (which is fine for me), but is actually able to easily understand everything when I do get a hold on him, and can give exellent tips as well. It's just perfect to have a "manager" that's perhaps more technically skilled than yourself, yet leaves you alone unless you request help.
Our department works toghether with some industry partners, and I've found the same isn't true there. I've met a great manager there, he was an engineer, but years dedicated to managing had left him completely clueless on the technical side.But believe it or not, he took some courses with our university (well, the most interesting parts of them anyway). This manager, from a large company, who also managed a large european project, was sitting between students in a computer room, trying to solve the challenges thrown at them.
Another manager I've met in a european project, has actually caused us some trouble, by misunderstanding a technical discussion we had with another partner. Problem here was a serieus lack of technical knowledge.
My conclusion? Managers need as much technical knowledge as they can. (Wait that doesn't reflect my point strongly enough, let me add this:) Everyone who thinks otherwise, should be lined up against a wall and shot.
Considering the vastness of our collective ignorance, and the smaller - but even more frightening - ignorance of people in key positions about the work for which they are responsible, it is absurd to argue that managers should lack domain expertise.
It seems obvious to me that a manager who understands what his people are doing will be more successful. BUT there are a few provisos that might blur the issue:
1. A "techie" manager must be able to resist the temptation to get sucked into micromanaging or - worse still - trying to compete with his own team. Instead, he should be mature enough to let people learn and grow, even if they must make mistakes in the process (and no one learns without a few mistakes).
2. As others have noted, not even the most gifted and expert techie knows it all. The manager must realise that, even in his own field of expertise, other opinions are valid - and sometimes might be better than his own.
3. Unless he is able to stay current (which is unlikely if he is doing his current job properly), a manager must always be careful to allow for the time that has passed since he was an active practitioner. The state of the art ten years ago is apt to be laughably obsolete today, especially in fast-changing fields like IT. (On the other hand, wisdom of the type contained in "The Mythical Man-Month", for instance, is just as relevant as it ever was).
4. A manager needs to be able to switch communication modes when talking to non-techies. Even a CIO will be unsuccessful if the other CxOs are baffled by what they they perceive as his "technical mumbo-jumbo". It is essential to talk each person's own language, stay within their comfort zones, and reason in ways they can appreciate and follow.
5. Even if technical knowledge is very desirable, it is not the most important attribute of a good manager. Leadership, the ability to listen and understand, team building, and sensitivity have to come first. Far better a seasoned, sympathetic manager from a different industry than a stubborn, micro-managing, blinkered techie whose ideas have passed their sell-by date.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
What type of management do you have?
The author seems to be blowing her own horn (there's even the dead giveaway "I'm not blowing my own horn" line!). But rather than point out the various problems with her bullshit, let's focus on the one quantified piece of data in the article. She manages projects at an approximate rate of two per month, in addition to designing, installing and configuring systems. Clearly she can do what she does simply because the projects are so small, it's possible to get your head around them without having to do a great management job.
She says the key is to "time-slice". Presumably calling it "time management", an extremely old managerial concept, would involve admitting to herself that she's not doing anything special.
Actually, I'd say there's two key components to what she seems to do. First, and she deserves respect for this, is clearly being able to work in a number of different disciplines where others would struggle. Two, none of the individual things she does is particularly challenging, making it possible to flit about. Other managers - say someone responsible for a multi-year project - will either find it offensive or simply ridiculous for someone to imply that just being a manager isn't good enough.
The purpose of the PM is to keep the project on track. Any additional knowledge will only slow him down as he tries to "fix" things that should be left to the people in the project originally assigned to do so.
The idea of having a PM is so you can leave the tech people alone doing their thing and not having to worry about scheduling and other non technical work. The best PMs I have worked with were not technically impaired, in fact they were geeks but within the scope of the project they acted as if they did not know a thing about it. This is why they worked out so well, they could talk to the client just fine, but did not get lost whenever talking to one of the programmers for more than 5 minutes.
I also had PMs that had absolutely no technical knowledge, but they understood the goals, had a very good relationship with the client and they listened to us. Project makes it on budget, client is happy, programmers don't hate the project or the PM, the PM still has all of his hair and did not turn into an alcoholic so everyone wins.
The two biggest problems with project managers, something that has not changed in the past 15 years or so:
1. Prima donna customers.
2. Prima donna programmers.
Not much you can do about #1, since these customers usually hold a lot of cash that you want to push your way. As for #2, you will be amazed at how much nicer it is to deal with the PMs if you (I am going to include myself in this one, guilty as charged) bump down the attitude from a 12 (on a ten scale) to maybe a 9.5.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
Some say that good managers should not be technical at all.
Those people are idiots.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
alright, I'm an ex-nerd. I swerved out of the way of that behemoth and went into cooking.
We all start as learning kids, and move up up up. Almost every manager has at one point washed dishes, worked the shit jobs, taken out the trash a million times, cooked a trillion steaks, put the dishes together every night for the last XX years.
The managers are managers because they were the best employee in the house when the last manager left.
When the shit hits the fan and the base line cook can't handle it, the manager steps in and takes the wheel, making the food come out right and fast. That's the managers root job, to make sure that everything goes right. If the manager has to do it themselves, then they do it, without thinking.
Any time I deal with a manager outside the kitchen, especially owners, I am exceedingly frustrated. They don't understand at all the pressures or requirements of what it really takes to make a restaurant work. If they don't understand, they have no business being in the kitchen, because it's simply a hassle.
Managers have to be a working, driving, and very aware part of the team. Most of the time they are working the busiest and hardest station, because they are the most qualified to do so.
The idea of having non-technical managers is absolutely absurd. How you guys can put up with it I really don't understand.
Oh, and try telling me that your managers have a lot of big picture - small picture transition difficulty. Managers in professional kitchens work in the 70 - 90 hours a week range, working simultaneously physically and mentally. Juggling small things like how large the brunoise is, a few grains of salt in the sauce, all the way up to how the restaurant is being advertised, doing the bookkeeping, keeping track of public opinion, and staying on vision.
If a manager is supposed to 'make it happen.' then (s)he should be prepared to do it him/herself.
I think when your boss is a tech, ou get more respect if you know things, and that goes for the boss as well.
.... Sounds bad, but I did not feel sorry for them, as they were bullshitting the non-tech management, simulating hard work .... ...
Besides that, as a technical person, I like when my boss knows what 1080i is, or builds his own project car, or built his own media center, and does not get scared in front of a unix shell.
But hey, just a general technical interest can go a long way.
Flim-flam? Yep, I have seen a lot-of guys doing that, in fact once 4 people got fired when I got hired, because it turned out, that on the first week i did more stuff, they did in the last 10 months (4 altogether)
But yep, you can BS non-tech bosses, but you can get screwed when you do it in excess
the technology and people they are managing is:
"pointy-haired boss".
The cartoon strip captures them perfectly.
What really makes these kind of managers dangereous is that after a while they pick up and began using jargon and buzz-words, without really understanding what they are saying. Then they begin to believe they are "knowledgeable". With that belief they begin making decisions without consulting those on their staff who really know. When trouble arises over their uneducated decisions they blame the staff.
--
GreyGeek
Northwestern University offers a program that is sort of the inverse of the one C.J. talks about in her article - MITP. 70% technology and 30% business, aimed at producing technologically competent managers.
of becoming a general to be able to receive and return salutes. To be put in charge of an accounts department, you really need to be able to count past ten without taking your shoes off. If you want to read the news on TV, you may find it beneficial to actually be able to speak.
I will never try and sell medical equipment because I do not understand all that it does. I will not buy hardware or software from someone who can't answer my questions because they don't know such technicalities as what a CPU or NAS is.
Why then, is it not taken as read that to run an IT department, you must have some knowledge anout IT?
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
In either case, after a while BOTH OF YOU ARE LAIDOFF! LOL (The Forest for the Trees)
The idea that to be a good manager one should not be technically competant is bullshit advanced by incompetant people.
My advise to anyone hearing this crap is to dust off your resume and get out fast.
Several of my friends from uni are now in management. (We were told at uni that within a few years, half of engineering graduates would be. Do you think we were interested?) They seem to be doing quite well.
My dad has long been a hands-on keep-in-touch civil engineer / general manager, and it was clear from those above, below, and beside him that they all appreciated him in that role.
No
On the other hand, a lot of technically good people do not adapt easily to managing. I've seen plenty stuff it up. Of various "IT Managers" I've worked under, the last one was my favourite. His background is business management and HR, not IT. He learned how to keep oddball techs working together, and was able to keep us motivated through some difficult times. The level of trust between us was so good that even while disagreeing on something, we could explicitly state our own and each others' bias, and then compensate for it in reaching agreement in the way forward.
Since then we've had some restructuring and outsourcing, and I now answer directly to the CEO. A parallel position to mine was created, and I happily allowed the guy in it to notch up to effectively become IT manager, with two new junior techs under him. He's doing well as a group manager, and I'm able to keep focus where my strengths are, and where it's harder to find anyone else to cover the work.
Depends
Some people are suited to managing employees. Some people are suited to managing projects (but not necessarily having any other role in them). Some people require close, regular management, and some don't. Some situations need a person with both technical understanding and the authority to direct, purchase, and prioritise for whole groups.
Answer
It's possible, but not automatic, and not always necessary.
-- All your bass are below two Hz
If you don't know the difference between fiction and reality...
you too could be POTUS
Management is the biggest problem in IT. It is better to take a senior techie and sent him to management camp than use a dedicated manager who knows little to nothing about technology. This also rewards senior techies which provide incentives for junior ones to work harder.
In a company large enough to support it, there should be a manager with a technical background who can understand what the engineers are saying and provide occaisional insight or recommendations, who would then translate that into 'business speak' for management who lacks such a background.
That is not to say that technical management should necessarily have the same specific background or skillset as the engineers who report to them, but they should have enough to understand tecnical jargon, and specific requests. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to explain a complex technical issue to someone with no background, unless it is a technical manager who feels that they can do everything you can, but better (if they only had the time).
What I've seen work best is technical management with 'generalist' backgrounds, with reports who have more in depth, but specific, backgrounds.
I work in a technical (non IT/Engineering, but still techn-based) industry. My background is math/IT, and I have a good enough grasp on the technology involved to figure out what goes where.
We have a senior ops manager, however, who is clueless. It's not just that he doesn't know. When you tell him something, his eyes glaze over. He doesn't care. He can't be bothered to make sense of it. It results in mistakes equivalent in foolishness and preventability to not knowing that cars need oil changes. This manager does NOT undertand the product he is responcible for and therefore CANNOT manage it effectively.
The same can be true for any tech product - even an IT department - which is a product being provided to it's home company. A manager needs to "get it" in order to support and develop the product.
Our CEO does have some tech background, but he is very far removed from it. Unlike the senior mgr, he asks questions, he listens, he asks more if needed. This to me is a happy medium.
One does not need to be *intimately* acquianted with a technology to manage it effectively. A good grasp of the basics can be combined with a well chosen staff. That's where smarts and good management skills come in.