Do Non-Technical Managers Add Value?

New submitter Kimomaru writes "Ars Technica asks, 'How does a non-technical manager add value to a team of self-motivated software developers?' IT Managers have come some way in the past decade (for some). Often derided as being, at best, unnecessary and, at worst, a complete waste of budgetary resources, managers in technology today can add significant value by shielding developers and systems engineers from political nonsense and red tape. From the article: 'Don't underestimate the amount of interaction your manager does with other departments. They handle budgets, training plans, HR paperwork. They protect the developers from getting sucked into meetings with other departments and provide a unified front for your group.'" Has that been your experience?

Comments

Valuable source of proteins but especially lipids

[sideslash]

Consumed in moderation, they can be part of a balanced and brain enriching diet. Personally, I am sort of a vegan when it comes to this specific item at the cafeteria, so I make it up with M&Ms and Mountain Dew.

Two Flavors

[mythosaz]

Project managers come in two flavors:

Those who put check-marks next to items on SOWs, and those who can bring people of dissimilar skill-sets together to complete a complex project.

Those in the former should be shot.
Those in the later should be praised.

Re:Two Flavors

[icebike]

Even without acting as a bridge to external people, simply having an educate but non-technical resource on hand is useful.

If you can't explain your project to your manager in terms they can understand, you have no hope of explaining it to the end-users, upper management, budget committees, etc. If your non-technical manager sees through your bullshit, its your clue you are doing it wrong.

Just as the act of merely explaining a problem to another programmer will often yield insight into the solution (without the other programmer saying a single word, or perhaps paying all that much attention), explaining stuff to a non-technical manager often helps with the design and implementation. The questions they ask will also be asked by others.

Re:Two Flavors

[Shinobi]

I have to agree with both you and the GP.

A good manager without a technical background can be a boon simply because it forces you to examine the project from another angle, and can thus increase the likelihood of spotting pitfalls etc.

Also, in terms of skills and abilities, there's a skill and a personal knack good managers have that is WAY more important technical skill: The understanding of logistics and planning ahead. Especially since it's a trait many developers themselves lack.

Working as a freelancer, in many projects I have to do the logistics, time management, all the paperwork etc myself, which is quite complicated, and makes me value managers even more. It's often a thankless task even when the manager is good but events are beyond their control(Such as "I ordered that shipment a month ago, it arrived in-country a week ago, but it's still stuck in customs...").

Re:Two Flavors

[DexterIsADog]

This sounds like a pretty decent environment, but I have a quibble - the project manager should not be "above you". I've held most technical, and now, most non-technical management positions in IT, and if your project manager is not working with, or often *for* you, then you're not getting your money's worth.

However, I also believe that management at every level is at least as obligated to the people lower on the reporting hierarchy as they are to him/her, so I might be in the minority in saying that your internal customers include people who report to you.

Re:Two Flavors

[Trailer Trash]

Even without acting as a bridge to external people, simply having an educate but non-technical resource on hand is useful.

If you can't explain your project to your manager in terms they can understand, you have no hope of explaining it to the end-users, upper management, budget committees, etc. If your non-technical manager sees through your bullshit, its your clue you are doing it wrong.

Just as the act of merely explaining a problem to another programmer will often yield insight into the solution (without the other programmer saying a single word, or perhaps paying all that much attention), explaining stuff to a non-technical manager often helps with the design and implementation. The questions they ask will also be asked by others.

I agree with what you say, but the problem is giving this person authority over the group. You could have such a person who is within the group but not over it. My wife actually fulfills that role for me in my business, with a couple of select customers filling in if other knowledge is required that she doesn't have.

In my only actual "job" I had a non-technical manager who was good for most of the reasons that you say, but her cluelessness seriously held our group back in various ways. Her inability to understand at any level what we did and what a reasonable way to do it would be caused endless frustration. The "interfacing with other groups" and all that didn't work as she was too clueless and the rest of us had to carry on that responsibility. We were the internal IT department for an IT department within a larger organization, so all of these problems were amplified as the rest of the department was a bunch of nerds, also.

On the other hand, she did take time to teach me how to write project proposals and stuff like that in which she excelled. However, that means that in the end I had acquired her extremely limited skill set myself and added it to my otherwise very marketable skill set in programming, which made her of even *less* value to our team.

In case you think I'm pissed because I got burned, quite the opposite. She fought for me like nobody and even mentioned when I quit that my pay increase (as a percentage) during my time there was the highest in our department. I liked her as a person and think that she would have been highly effective in the right job. She had the motivation, was physically attractive (say what you want - it matters), and intelligence to be great at a lot of things. Tech just wasn't one of them.

Managers

[Thyamine]

I think the problem is the same most IT professionals find about their own job. When you have a good manager, they are almost invisible and you don't realize what is going on behind the scenes. When they are a problem, then you notice and complain. It's how most of the other departments in a company see IT. Completely ignore them unless something is wrong, and then complain about them.

Re:Managers

[black6host]

I think the problem is the same most IT professionals find about their own job. When you have a good manager, they are almost invisible and you don't realize what is going on behind the scenes. When they are a problem, then you notice and complain. It's how most of the other departments in a company see IT. Completely ignore them unless something is wrong, and then complain about them.

Before retiring I was an IT manager. I can tell you my presence was a great benefit to my employees. In addition to isolating them from all the politics and idiotic suggestions from other department heads, I also was a mentor. My staff had varying skill levels and I worked with each one to help them improve their skill set. I also prevented those less qualified from being assigned tasks better handled by someone else.

In addition, I fought the rest of upper management to make my staff's working environment enjoyable. No overtime when I was there. I knew enough to know that overtime is, generally speaking, non-productive when forced, and forced often.

I also instituted incentive plans for those of my staff that tried hard. They didn't have to be superstars, they just had to try to improve themselves. And my staff loved me. All our software was developed in house and we did a major conversion on one of the pieces, probably the most important piece in the chain. We did it on time, minimal roll out issues and no overtime. And everyone had fun along the way.

Problem was, the owners couldn't see the benefit I was bringing to them. Most projects like that are late, over budget and don't work right out of the gate. They fired me :)

Wonder how they like things now?

Re:Managers

[sabri]

When you have a good manager, they are almost invisible and you don't realize what is going on behind the scenes

This is so, so true. At some point in my career, I was working for a large vendor's Advanced TAC. I had a manager who occasionally would come up to my desk with some hot escalation which needed immediate attention. I was wondering what he was doing all day.

Then came the day that he left. He got the Silicon Valley escort out of the building right after his resignation, and I got a temporary manager. All hell broke loose. That's when I realized the true value of my former manager: he was shielding his precious TAC engineers from unnecessary political escalations and made sure that we only got cases which needed our attention, and made sure we actually have some time to analyze the case before coming to a preliminary conclusion. My workload tripled.

I have also been on the other side of that coin. Not so long ago, I was working as a team lead for another large vendor, on a project for a new product. I had a couple of engineers in my team and they would sometimes jokingly ask what I was doing all day. Coming in at 11am, delegating a bunch of tasks and leaving at 4pm. What they did not see is that I worked at home from 8am until 10:30am, and usually until late at night. When I left, I spoke my best engineer a few weeks later. He confessed that he sometimes thought that I was a slacker, but that he now got my workload and was suffering badly. Best compliment I've ever had.

A good manager deals with the paperwork

[msobkow]

A good manager deals with the paperwork of requisitions, financing, and getting "buy in" from "customer" departments and management.

A good manager makes sure your projects have visibility, and that their successes and ROI are broadcast through the company so your department doesn't end up downsized.

Having technical knowledge is good for a manager to understand what their team is doing and what they're saying in meetings, but "technical knowledge" is not and never has been what the manager's job is about. A good manager doesn't need to understand the details, because they're not micro-managing their staff.

I've had a few in my time.

[jcr]

Two of the best bosses I've ever had could be described as "non-technical managers". They made sure I had what I needed to get my work done, they were very clear about the objectives, and they kept the rest of the organization from distracting our team.

-jcr

Re:I've had a few in my time.

[dbc]

This. Rule number 1 for managers: have clear goals, and communicate them. Rule #2: make sure the team has what they need.

The best boss I ever had was an ex-Israeli commando officer. No, no, no, he wasn't a "do it or I kill you" manager. He was good because: 1) there was never, ever, any doubt in your mind whatsoever what he wanted accomplished. 2) When you told him what you needed to accomplish that, he either got it, or adjusted the goal. When you think about it, no good officer sends in a team of commandos with a fuzzy objective and poorly equipped. To do otherwise it to spend too much of your life writing unpleasant letters to parents.

Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies

[Wizworm]

The answer clearly is no

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

Non-technical managers are technical

[hessian]

They're technical, but in another discipline: organizational management.

Unfortunately, most companies treat this as if it were not a discipline, which allows them to promote either (a) cronies or (b) droids who went through the project management courses that are short of an MBA.

Your "non-technical" managers specialize in planning projects, keeping people off your backs, and keeping you from falling into common developer pitfalls.

Keep them -- just insist on having good ones, so you have fewer of them.

OP Has It

[snookerdoodle]

"shielding developers and systems engineers from political nonsense and red tape"

Yup, plus shielding users and clients from those of us whose interpersonal skills aren't as great as we think they are.

Sometimes, though, this same role can be filled by a Team Leader who actually does have great people skills.

ObAnecdote: I had a coworker and friend who was a great developer but who always managed to get people mad at him. He was so oblivious to this fact that he'd occasionally comment about how well he got along with users and customers. One day, he came in laughing about the previous night's Big Bang Theory, telling us how clueless Sheldon was because he pissed everyone off and had no idea he was doing it. Yeah, he was that oblivious. And our manager protected many users from him.

Good managers allow for code mode

[quietwalker]

You ever duck your head down, put the earphones on, and cut a swath through the feature list, barely realizing that you've missed lunch and it's already 7pm? You'd leave but you've just thought of a really elegant optimization routine and it's so obvious, but you need to see it work before you go?

A good manager can provide coordination between project members, act as an insulating buffer between customers/requirements and devs, fight for resources, push back against poor requests and push forward agendas like refactoring, internal tool development, or library updates (ie, the Good Fight). Really though, this boils down to the simple goal of letting the devs do their job.

Without all the other context switching, we're free to descend into code mode, shut out the outside world, and make beautiful code that we're proud of. In practical terms, that means less bugs, better security, efficient code, lower cost of maintenance, and so on. That's the biggest thing a manager can really provide; an environment where we're free to excel.

That doesn't require any sort of technical chops.

new respect for good managers

[trybywrench]

I made the jump from developer to team lead and now on to management. Good management is very very hard, keeping people on task, motivated, and managing burn out is really more of an art than science and I'm not even including dealing with different personality strengths/weaknesses and the various combinations thereof.

If you have a good manager or even just a not-bad manager let them know. It's a difficult position to do well and lots of folks who you respect see you as worthless.

Product Managers vs Worst Non-technical

[Ukab the Great]

Salespeople

- To be good in sales, you have to be able to lie to yourself about the quality of a product, because the customer will not be able to believe it's a good product unless you believe it's a good product.

- To be good in sales, you have to be able to convince yourself that a customer has a need for something that they in actuality have no need for.

- To be good in sales, you have to have the belief that "the product is awesome because I am awesome."

- To be good in sales, you have to do anything you can to get a sale

- A good sales person can sell sand to arabs and ice to eskimos.

Product Managers

- To be a good product manager, you cannot lie to yourself that a product is superior.

- To be a good product manager, you have to design a product that people will really want and really need.

- To be a good product manager, you have to be able to say "I am only decent if the product is decent".

- To be a good product manager, you have to have to be willing to push back against a change that will harm the long-term usability or usefulness of a product for everyone else at the cost of getting a short term sale for one specific customer.

- To be a good product manager, you have to make sure your company won't be selling sand to arabs or ice to eskimos, but rather selling ice to arabs to cool their drinks and sand to eskimos to give their cars traction.

With the rare exception of someone like Steve Jobs who's good at both roles, promoting an outstanding salesperson to do product management is like hiring a convicted arsonist to run your fire department. .

Acronym abuse

[fiannaFailMan]

Project managers come in two flavors:

Those who put check-marks next to items on SOWs, and those who can bring people of dissimilar skill-sets together to complete a complex project.

Those in the former should be shot.
Those in the later should be praised.

I assume you mean the first item on this list?

• Statement Of Work
• Scope Of Work
• Special Operations Wing
• Sign of Weakness (Wyckoff trading theory)
• Speaking of Which
• Schemes of Work (Department for Children, Schools and Families; UK)
• Sound of Water
• Suspension of Work
• Save Our World
• Share of Wallet
• Spirit of the Wolf (Everquest)
• Stand-Off Weapon
• School-on-Wheels
• Show Low, AZ, USA (Airport Code)
• Superstars of Wrestling (TV Show)
• Seal of Wisdom (gaming, world of warcraft)
• Start of Word (computer programming)
• Switch on Wheels (telecomunications)
• Special Order Weapon
• Sent on Way
• Save Our Waterways (environmental group)
• Source of Wealth
• Songs of Worship
• Subordination of Women

Seriously, I'm getting sick of having to look up acronyms every five minutes. Why can't people just spell out WTF they're talking about these days? SMH.

Re:No

[mooingyak]

Depends on the manager. I had one recently (re-org. He's still around but I don't report to him anymore) who was excellent at exactly what the summary stated: shielding us from red tape and political BS. He was mildly technical - he could code if he had to, but it wasn't his strength, and (this is probably what made him good) *he knew it*. He would do requirements gathering, secure resources when necessary, and stay out of the way on technical stuff. He'd also take my estimates and grossly inflate them, which generally made them more accurate. Good managers exist, but it's an odd niche sometimes. If we swapped jobs, we'd probably both be much worse at it.