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When Developers Work Late, Should the Manager Stay?
jammag writes "A veteran developer looks back — in irritation — at those times he had to work late and his unskilled manager stayed too, just to look over his shoulder and add worry and fret to the process. Now, that same developer is a manager himself — and recently stayed late to ride herd over late-working developers. 'And guess what? Yep, I hadn't coded in years and never in the language he had to work with.' Yet now he understood: his own butt was on the line, so he was staying put. Still, does it really help developers to have management hovering on a late evening, even if the boss handles pizza delivery?"
I'm not a programmer, but a journalist. My best hovering manager story was 2 years ago, when a shopping mall caught fire in the middle of the night. A photog and I put down our beers and rushed out there. When we got back to the office, the editor was there, and it's a good thing, too. His instructions to me were to "write something quickly, so we can get it in the paper." To the photog, he said, "pick out your two or three best pictures." I shudder to think what we'd have done w/o that guidance. /sarcasm