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?

Comments

a Tech Mgr or Mgr of Tech??

[jackb_guppy]

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.

Re: a Tech Mgr or Mgr of Tech??

[Anonymous Coward]

Oy - this whole topic hits a sensitive spot with me...

There are myriad stories about "clever geeks working for clueless manager(s)." My question is

What would you do if you were promoted to a position where you could change things?

Because - this has happened to me. So far, it isn't any fun at all, and I'm scratching my head looking for a way to pull the department out of the mess it has become over the years.

For several years, I was the alpha-geek in a small, somewhat dysfunctional university IT department. (*both* the department and the university are dysfunctional, if you were wondering). Recently, I got promoted to IT Director, and this over the heads of a few other managers in the department who were passed over for the reasons that...well, they're not very good, and after a long long time, it seems somebody woke up to the fact that they were high-class bullshitters...my current soundbite is "we have adopted a more sophisticated technology platform to enable us to have more incomprehensible excuses".

I'm very frustrated with the senior people in my department -- they seem to want to play at being managers and seem to have a poor- to-nonexistent grasp of most operational or even strategic issues...basically they never think in adequate detail, even on non-technical issues and they've all gotten very good at identifying the locus of any problem as belonging to "somebody else." And they are very quick to grumble about "leadership issues" on my part.

The grumbling about leadership/management issues is justified in part, because I am swamped with technical stuff that just isn't getting handed over because of skills gaps (yawning skills chasms, actually).

We weren't supposed to need any development skills because we migrated to a third-party system, but I find that every frigging day stuff comes along that needs some programming work...and because I'm the sole surviving developer, either I do it & become yet another bottleneck or people invent insane and badly broken manual methods for stuff that often requires a small army of data capture people. (And yes, a lot of the problems are that the newly acquired system sucks rocks, which is not something I can confront directly until we have seen some ROI on it)

I constantly feel a bipolar split between the need to motivate people and the desire to take our middle management, put them on a boat and torpedo it in shark infested waters.

Perhaps some of my frustration is that I do have a vision for what I want to do in this department -- but that vision depends on having different people than the ones we currently have. However, I don't have any vision that works with the management staff we have. I just can't see how you can have a 25-odd person IT department at a university with no technical knowledge in the overstaffed and overpaid middle management -- we have 7 people paid equivalent to or better than a full prof, of which 5 are almost useless and frequently disruptive. Some are "experts" in HR & governance theory, some are just plain bullshitters, some are sociopathic sysadmins who spend their time blaming the vendors for everything and then get mad at me when I won't beat the vendor up, and there are issues with just plain laziness and the inevitable hoarding secret info & not communicating with anybody to insure job security by stealth. Fingerpointing abounds, and the lack of responsibility-taking is, well, not my fault^W^W^Wa serious impediment to getting anything done.

Since noses got put out of joint when I got promoted over people, I was pretty careful to put requests in the form of "we need to do this"...but it seems that none of this was direct enough, and the things we needed to do didn't happen.

Back to the "development skills" issue -- and I'm not talking rocket science here...I'm talking about writing stuff to do simple DB queries and spit out CSV files/spreadsheets and to do general DB cleanup/maintenance/population tasks. This

Re:One example

[Anonymous Coward]

The worst part of this story is that 20 years *if* you walked into a Radio Shack and ask for polarized resistors you'd probably at least be talking with someone knowledgeable enough to laugh at you. Nowadays, under the same circumstances, the kid behind the counter would look it up in the catalog, not find it, and just offer to sell you some batteries.

Nay 'Can', Must.

[Demiansmark]

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.

Hi, Sys Admin to Director over here...

[ellem]

I have 2 HUGE problems as a manager who was a tech.

1) I side with my "guys" (who are .33 women!) too often.
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.

Re:It depends on your perspective

[ClassMyAss]

It doesn't make you a good employee, either. There's got to be something wrong if you don't want the boss to know what you're doing (at work)...

Yes, and often (especially with the non-IT types that often manage groups of programmers, and more especially in companies that do not primarily work in IT) that something that's wrong is that your boss is an idiot about computers. If someone doesn't need to (or can't) understand implementation details, then they are best protected from them - this is Encapsulation 101, and it applies just as reasonably to human interactions as digital ones. If it later turns out that they do need more details, it's easy to open up a bit; it's all but impossible to lock people out if they start to get too invasive, though.

What are the qualifications of a manager?

[AK Marc]

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?

Your sig is retarded.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Relevant knowledge is never bad

[Archtech]

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.