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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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
It's all a matter of personality, I think. A good techie is not necessarily cut out for management, and not all managers are cut out to understand the underlying technology they're managing in any real depth.
On the other hand, I've met a lot of techies that don't understand that trust is earned, and respect easily lost.
--S
-- sigs cause cancer.
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)
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.
Obviously, Yes! However, how many techies have the necessary organisation and human skill to climb up the corporate ladder?
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.
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.
A one word point on whether having managers with a technical background in a technology company is superior - Google
If it wasn't, I'd be questioning why you earn so much more than a sysadmin.
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
A senior manager who wants a genuine estimate would ask the technical lead for it, but large consultancies often don't care about the team leaders reality. More often than not their budgets are designed to spend $X in time 'T' with 'P' people to get to stage 'S'. From this they expect to make back $X + $X1, similar financial practices are used to build things as diverse as houses and battleships.
With large consultancies (or incestous corporate "partnerships") your project is often part of a multi-million dollar contract that basically says "we will look after your IT needs for five years in return for skimming the cream from your expenditure", for the deal to work the money MUST be spent in such a way that it lasts five years. From memory, the ideal "estimate" for a project comes in at -5% to +15% of the "real cost", ouside of that range too often and the PM is out of that nice corner office. This leads to the bizzare situations I have witnessed where one executive gets into deep shit for saving millions in costs and another gets a fat bonus for shuffling account numbers and playing solitaire.
I used quotes for "real costs" since the "real" part is only in the minds of accountants. Even the PM's I have admired would spend a considerable amount of time shuffling account numbers to ensure their projects come within the acceptable range regardless of reality. Without all this accounting bullshit a large chunk of the population could be doing something more usefull, OTOH, without it we wouldn't have built the pyramids in the first place.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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
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]
The questions are:
can they do it well enough?
do they know what well enough is?
do they know what it is?
do they know when it has to be done?
do they know why it (their work) is important?
These are the things that matter
Your staff will probably do it differently too!
-- Butlerian Jihad NOW!
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.
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