Fire Your IT Boss

theodp writes "Instead of laying off techies who directly help users, Robert X. Cringely argues that the best place to cut IT organizations is at the top. One of the great problems in IT management, Cringely says, is that the big bosses typically haven't a clue what is happening, what needs to happen, and what it all should cost. He issues the following challenge: 'If you are managing an IT shop and can't write the code to render "hello world" in C, HTML, PHP, and pull "hello world" from a MySQL database using a perl script, then you are in the wrong job.' Even with help from Google, Cringely believes many technical managers would fail this test and should get the boot as a result — you can't manage what you don't understand."

Comments

Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that

[Nutria]

I often think the better way to consider a manager is as an assistant to those who do the actual work, taking care of the peripheral details of a project allowing the important people to do the actual work.

Excellent point. My manager is an old COBOL & IMS programmer who can't write a word of SQL.

But... he knows what the difference is between OLTP and a Data Warehouse, knows that IO is slower than core, and is bright enough to have learned from us the difference between sorted and hashed indexes, and when to use them, and what happens when indexes get out of whack.

Thus, even though he can't do what his underlings do, he knows what's reasonable and not, and bravely defends us from User Stupidity and Programmer Incompetence.

When he retires, I'm going to cry.

Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that

[jcr]

A 'car guy' is not necessarily good at running a business.

Henry Ford and Enzo Ferrari did pretty well at it. So did Ferdinand Porsche, Frederick Royce, Karl Benz, and Walter Bentley.

-jcr