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The Case Against Non-technical Managers
Kelerei writes: Lorraine Steyn, owner of a small software development company in Cape Town, has published an opinion piece that may hit too close to home for some: making a case against non-technical managers. She writes about the all too common disconnect between IT staff and the boardroom table and states that 'one of the ways to solve this, is to bring managers closer to the coal face. Technical training programs are critical for your development team to keep apace with change, and investing the time for IT management to do the training too can pay dividends... [if a manager feels he doesn't] have enough time to get that close to the detail of what your department does, think about whether you would appoint a non-financial manager to handle your money'.
Can I get the icon in cornflower blue?
I work in pharmacy and I can't tell you the number of people over me who aren't even certified as a pharmacy technician. They either came up through the retail division or through some MBA pathway and they sit there and make decisions about how a retail pharmacy should run without having worked in any sort of pharmacy. It's how you get stupid stuff like a 15 minute guarantee that prioritizes speed over patient safety.
It's difficult because the executives at the top don't understand why it's a problem. How are you supposed to bring your issues to someone who has no idea how those issues impact your daily life? I mean, how long does it take to put a sticker on a bottle and fill it with pills? I can imagine it's the same in IT. In a previous life I'd fallen into a couple of IT positions (by virtue of "knowing computers" better than the other people at the small business) and trying to explain security to them is like trying to explain an egg shell to a brick wall. I can only imagine what IT people in a dedicated department must go through trying to justify themselves to 20 layers of management. Good luck.
... and other high level staff in my experience have pretty much been non-everything rather than simply non-technical. "The less you do, the more you make," is a quote that comes to mind. Upper management (and human resources) at my place of business can barely make use of correct spelling, grammar, and mechanics; their grasp on technology isn't much better.
I see this as a wider problem, not just with managers.
It is no different than the problem I have seen with many developers/programmers who are unwilling to learn (to the point of fighting it) the business that they are developing software for. Most developers develop software for some business other than for other developers and refusing to educate yourself about the business that you are developing for limits the usefulness of those resources.
Similarly, Managers managing technical people should learn what they are managing - though they don't necessarily have to worry about the details of it. Of course the smaller the company the more knowledge technically that manager should have since there is less room for specialization.
And of course, a bad manager can manage anything. Neither can manage a function they don't understand well. But why would you think that matters?
Go along to get along.
Don't rock the boat.
We encourage employees to speak up when they see something wrong. And after they self-sort themselves to the top we get rid of them. Troublemakers.
Employees with technical skills are the slaves
Managers are the high-school dropouts and the rulers.
The enemy of Managers is the slaves.
The enemy of the slaves is the Managers.
The high-school dropout are hired as managers is because they are compromised and will do the bidding of the CEO and Board.
Managers do not have the brain capacity for anything technical. Only bestiality, immorality, obscenity, perversion, thievery are their talents.
That is why the CEO and Board loves their dearest managers.
The non-technical manager who understands his job is the best, they stay out of the decision-making while getting the necessary high level information they need.
The technical manager who understands his job is second best, he can get too involved in low level design and decisions but overall he'll make sound decisions and play his part in office politics.
The technical manager who doesn't understand his job can be a pretty terrible manager of budgets, estimates, schedules, deadlines and that short of thing but at least the results are technically sound. The non-technical manager who doesn't understand his job is absolutely worst. You get management by some silly theory with metrics that don't make sense and estimates that don't exist with the accuracy they want.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Does anyone believe that VW didn't have technical managers? In the end, did it really make a difference?
I'd also argue requiring manager to come up from the ranks, while helpful in some respects, precludes the idea non-technical managers shouldn't have been attending bootcamps and the like in the first place. I'm expected to keep current in my field. Why should the bar be set so low for management not to learn about the department they are managing from day one?
That this is even under discussion highlights how utterly worthless most management is.
And in a even grander scheme of things, it makes me question the very notion of meritocracy. This is not the best and the brightest. This is barnacles on the engine of progress.
in a heartbeat. most 'financial managers' i have dealt with want to sell insurance or annuities since they are not legally required (in the US) to have a fiduciary responsibility to their clients.
I think the logic is: thanks to the Peter Principle, managers will always be incompetent. So why not just hire incompetent people from the get-go?
I dislike over generalizations, and while i agree with the theme of the article, this is my objection.
Take the flip side. If you have a programmer developing software in a business area that she or he has no prior training or formal education in or kniwledge of, would you consider that programmer to be useless and worthless?
I suspect the true answer lies somewhere in between, and is also subjective. In a given project team, the effectiveness of an individual (manager or otherwise) is dependant on how well that individual is able to use their skills to help the team achieve their project goals.
That does not mean that every single individual has to technical. It only means that the individual has to be highly effective in what they do, and their effectiveness should be aligned to benefit the team.
For example, if a team is developing an accounting software, a manager who is an accountant could be as effective as a purely technical manager. The accountant manager still needs to understand software and system limits/tradeoffs, but by that token, the engineers in her team aldo need to understand accounting. And if a bright engineer can pick up accounting basics on the fly, then a bright accountant can also pick up technology basics.
Assuming that the latter is not possible is just hubris and snobbery, IMHO.
think about whether you would appoint a non-financial manager to handle your money'
Management is about cost, schedule, and sales. The person in charge who understands the technical end is called an architect, not a manager.
Non-technical managers are often lousy, because they emphasize the wrong skill sets, and lack independent technical judgement of a crucial project. But technical managers are often lousy too, because they overestimate their own skill sets in terms of what's relevant today, and often become rigid.
It's the whole package that counts, where understanding one's own weakness and knowing how to compensate for that in an appropriate fashion helps a great deal.
I've also found that managers don't tend to improve with many years of experience, instead, they become lazy and fall into ruts, spending their days compiling spreadsheets and firing off emails linking to open bug counts and stuff like that.
It's the managers of the managers, aka, the executives.
The corporate boardroom is where all the nasty stuff takes place, and leads us into darkness.
Case in point. VW. You think a single low-level engineer would think that they should just cheat the test?
Even the boss of the engineer?
Of course not.
It happened at the top, and trickled its way down.
And the scary thing is that VW's board DOES have labor on it, thanks to German law.
I think we need to be more precise about the terms used when describing "manager". To a large extent, financial managers or portfolio managers don't manage people, they manage the finance or portfolio. Somehow, in the IT industry, we've developed a different terminology around the term "manager", where IT managers are people who manage IT "workers" rather than managing IT itself.
If we go all the way up to CIOs and CFOs, we see a similarity in usage. A non-financial CFO would be kind of a joke, a non-IT CIO would be the same. However, these "C" suite officers don't necessarily then have the entirety of IT or finance reporting into them. Sometimes they only manage small teams to provide "guidance" and "leadership" and the bulk of the workers report up to a COO or CEO.
I think across all industries, you do have conflicting notions as to whether people managers should be more skilled in the task that their people are doing, or more skilled in managing people and organizations. These are different types of specialty skills and while it would be great to want all managers to have it all, there are availability constraints that would make it difficult to source omniscient intellect for every position.
Most managerial material are practically incompetent. What they are good at is taking credit for other peoples work, manipulating people and projecting a general air of infallibility. That's why they're managers and you aren't.
I worked at a company where the promotion path was from IT engineering positions to managers.
That gave us micromanagement, "I'm the boss and i did your job so i am always right", and zero soft skills.
I left, technical managers make a workplace toxic.
Honestly, as far as the US is concerned, that's probably the result of socialized healthcare. When you only have one insurance company and one formulary to deal with, it's a lot easier for the doctors to write for something that's going to be payed for. And, if they know it won't be payed for, they don't need to wait for the pharmacy to let them know before they start the paperwork for a prior authorization.
A LOT of what slows down your prescription here in the states is third party rejections. Even if it's not your med, it may take me a few minutes to call the insurance company to get the override for a therapy change that they should have let me put in myself. That's assuming I don't have to write up a fax and send it in to the doctor so THEY can get an override. It's obnoxious.
Considering Canada has socialized medicine, though, I have no idea what's slowing them up.
For the task in hand, yes, that is a fair description. Even worse, he or she is quite likely to be a liability, because their lack of domain knowledge means that they could (with a very high degree of programming competence) implement entirely the wrong thing, creating a perfectly working disaster.
There is no substitute for domain knowledge, in any domain. Programming is like a surgeon wielding a scalpel --- unless you know a lot about how the target body works, you can end up with a corpse. And the programmer's reach is much wider, not limited to a single body.
It depends on the state. Neither Ohio or PA required anything back in 2008 (not sure about now). Here in Florida, we just started registering the technicians a few years ago. Prior to that, there were national certifications like the ExCPT and the PTCB which could help you land a job (and hopefully get payed better) but was NOT required. You literally just had to have a high school diploma and some semblance of competence. Now you either got grandfathered in (with like 1000+ hours) or you complete a board approved training program (which can be completed on the job as long as it's done within 6 months of hire).
But when I started many years ago as a pharmacy tech, I spent two days in a computer room doing training then I was counting pills and helping patients.
You are right, however, about IV compounding. In most hospitals it's done by a tech. The FDA has gotten crazy strict about it lately after a lot of mishaps, so now you need to take a lot of training in USP 797 before they will even let you in the clean room.
Most techies are practically incompetent. What they are good at is insisting that everything needs to be rewritten in whatever cool tech will look good on their CV, complaining that everyone but them are idiots, and projecting a general air of passive aggressiveness. That's why they're techies and everyone else is glad not to be.
... and neither should anybody else.
Managers don't need to now tech beyond basic principal levels.
They just should do their job properly, which actually does include just freaking come to me when there's a techical issue at hand or a deal with technical details to sign or the technical part of a project that needs evaluating. And all that has nothing to do wether a maneging position is techie or not, it has to do wether the manager is a good one or a bad one.
If management sells something to the customer that tech can't deliver within the set parameters and managers havn't ask tech before, then they've screwed up and aren't worth the salary they're raking in.
I don't care wether my boss can do PHP, MySQL or Linux CLI. I can show him some good parts whenever those may be useful, but heaven forbid that he wastes his time with PHP LDAP or some strange MySQL bug or something else. That's my frickin job! I'm the one doing those extra hours to make it work - he's supposed to put in those extra hours to get a hold of new customers and sell them gigs ... and *then* ask me how the margins are and what hours we have to expect to put into the project.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
...but that's the one that gets hired.
Proving yet again: Don't you just hate using the subject line as part of anything?
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Unfortunately when you try to explain WHY I'm the one doing those extra hours it'll take 2 more hours of explaining to a nontechie.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Sure, sure, another article about how the technicians know better than the managers. Half the time the conclusion is "Doggone it they should let US run the company!" whereas this one falls in the other half, namely "Those guys would run the company so much better if they just understood us!"
Bit of hubris there. People need to be aware of the limitations of their knowledge. The Dunning-Kruger effect is in full force, both for a manager looking at technical tasks, AND for a technician looking at management tasks. They are separate fields, and they should communicate, but remain separate. There will always be tension because their ways of looking at the world, and even their ideas about what constitutes a "good outcome," are inherently different.
n/t
What your asking about is called "Unit of Use" in the industry and quite a few companies offer them. If they don't and it's a popular drug, other companies called pharmacy repackagers will do it for them. For the most part, I love them. I just grab your drug off the shelf and slap a label on it. No counting, no verifying that the right pill just came out of the open bottle, nothing. Just labeling. That's the easy part, though. The reason it takes so long are the myriad of other distractions: the phone, insurance rejects, bad handwriting, patient inquiries, etc. Then there's also that other part: making sure the doctors aren't trying to kill you. Not all medications get along nicely. Some combinations will make you feel ill, some will make one med not work, and some will just outright kill you. Your primary care might not have gotten the memo from your cardiologist that he just changed your blood pressure medication. So, that antidepressant that slows down your heart a little bit along with that other med from your cardiologist may cause your heart to pump too slowly to perfuse your body. If I don't catch that and give you your med, you could die. So, I have to call one (or possibly both) of your doctors to see which is more important for you. There's more that goes on behind the counter besides lick, stick, count, and pour.
A manager does not need technical knowledge, but what he does need is the correct team and the correct management style to use that team effectively.
i.e. If you're not a technical manager and you try to micro-manage, you will fail. If you have more than one overarching job or more than one technical discipline and you try to micro-manage, you will fail. If you don't have trust in the capabilities of your team to do the work then you either need a new team or need to train them to the appropriate level. At no point should you be a substitute for their work.
The goal of management is to bring the end product together and delegate individual parts to individual people. If you're a technical person who gets into the gritties of your project then you're no longer a manager but a discipline leader, and chances are your own manager is micromanaging you to compensate for your lack of focus on what you're supposed to be doing.
As others have mentioned, whether a manager is technically inclined or not doesn't have all that much impact on whether he's good.
As a German psychologist and management trainer once said, most people either have people skills or organizational/technical skills. A good manager/boss needs both. And guess what, only about 10% of the population have an affinity for both.
This basically means that for every nine employees, you can have only one manager! And since you usually have more than one layer of management, you need beyond nine people per lowest management body to make that cut. I don't know about the US but in Switzerland, we sometimes designate a teamleader to a two man team.
There are just not enough competent people in existence to fill that many management roles. Simple as that. Simplify management structures. Use only those managers who actually can manage and weed out the donkey droppings. But seeing as, obviously, 50% of people are below average and some of those suck massively, that's going to be hard.
Here is a technical specification written by a schoolboy for further development by the engineering team. The genius is in the response from the developers.
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2...
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
to protect me from other non-technical managers so I can get work done. It's just the way things are and they way people are. I need someone watching out for me and my departments well being (and the well being of the company as a whole). That's a full time and surprisingly difficult job. It'd be nice if it wasn't. It would also be nice if we lived in a Star Trek style socialist Utopia. We don't.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
When I attempted to skip the mandatory ad, I got redirected to a porn site.
So memeburn has either been pwned, or it's just not a very reputable site.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
See subject: They're clearly not & yet they head up a dept. you work in??
* It's illogical - & companies wonder WHY they're doing badly (& it's a case of INFERIOR leadership).
(This is what you get in a society run by "secret handshake fraternities or religious cults" that 'stick by their brethren' vs. doing the RIGHT thing for everyone...)
APK
P.S.=> We all need one another - but we don't need blind DOLTS leading the pack - promote from WITHIN the ranks first, & then get them their MBA or mgt. degrees during their tenures as leaders IF need be (it's not)... apk
I think a manager needs to understand enough of the technology to make good decisions, and to know if their employees are technically competent.
I manage a small RF group. We recently had to decide on doing and I/Q or DDC based system for a high channel count receiver. I feel that I need to know enough about both of those to understand the trade-offs. Since this is an unusual application; a sensor system, not a data system, its important to know if the most commonly used solution for most applications applies here. The trade-off is not simple, there are differences in firmware complexity, calibration systems, hardware costs and flexibility.
This article can be generalized for not just IT but the entire software sector. I remember sitting through a meeting where it was evident that the driver is just too buggy to release and not going to meet the critical release schedule in time for back to school refresh. During the meeting we discussed why test failed and workarounds. At one point in time, one of the non-tech manager from the marketing actually said "Can validation guarantee there won't be a bug in the code?" At the time I thought what an idiot. To the validation manager's credit, he actually said "Can development guarantee not putting bugs in the code?" Boy it was the longest 10 second pause I've ever seen in a meeting. After that remark, we closed the meeting and the engineers were directed to figure out what can be done because it was evident that mixing tech discussion with non-tech people were not productive. And yes, after much discussion, we fixed critical bugs and managed to release on schedule no thanks to those idiot non-tech managers.
Boy are you confused. Managers aren't supposed to "get a hold of new customers and sell them gigs". That is what sales people (and sales engineers) are supposed to do. Managers are supposed to manage their team. If they are managing a technical team, and aren't grounded in technology then they can't be effective. It is like a architect who knows nothing about the construction process.
The last time I had a technically astute manager was in 2000.
or understand the work, you have no business directly trying to manage it.
Up a few levels of management ? Fine. But if you directly oversee a team of developers then you better damn well be able to do the job yourself so you fully understand what it takes to get it done.
Your function as a manager at that level is to act as intermediary between upper management and marketing and the team who gets the job done. You need to understand the job well enough to tell the upper level idiots that " No we can't have what they were promised by marketing done in a weeks time. "
There are good and bad managers. Good manager would know something about the area where s/he manages - how else can they do what they are supposed to. Their view and tasks are different from the crew at the floor. The same is true for the requirements on their skillset.
Personally, I have had more crap managers who were actually brilliant technical people with no management skills than good managers.
If a person has good management skills but no technical ability, they will still be a much better manager than a technical person who is promoted to management because the company "wants to reward their loyalty/performance".
Sadly, I have also met a lot of managers who were crap managers and who also had no technical knowledge. But in almost all cases, the bad managers were good at something within the company, and were simply promoted beyond their competence.
Most of the comments deal with a single layer of non-technical managers. I've encountered a situation at an international IT supplier where there were about as many managers on the project as technical staff, enough to make a critical mass such that a piece of information could become established as a fact because the managers kept telling it to each other even though there was no external support for it. It is amazing how unshakeable such false knowledge can become and how it can distort decision making, especially if they see it as a way to offload responsibility to someone else.
At one place of employment, we got a new manager who had a technical background. He took rather too much interest in our day-to-day details. Didn't like the CMS we were using, didn't like the language we were using, etc. Primary reason for the dislike was that they weren't technologies he was familiar with. He did eventually back off, but there was a lot of stress for a while. There are always tradeoffs.
linquendum tondere
Insurance companies have squeezed nearly all the profit out of the pharmacy. So, even for a high volume store a lot of the corporate people are loathe to allow more than one pharmacist to be working at any one time. Pharmacists aren't cheap at around $1/minute. And when you're only making $1-2 per script, that's even more expensive. The problem, though, is that, by law (and for good reason), nearly everything that happens in the pharmacy needs to go through the pharmacist. Best cough med? Only the pharmacist can answer. Dangerous med? Needs counseling? Only the pharmacist. New phone in? Only the pharmacist. Then, every single prescription needs to be checked and signed off on by the pharmacist. You have to understand that literally the only person behind the counter who has more than a few months formal training is the pharmacist and that, again by law, they are ultimately responsible for ANYTHING that goes wrong behind the counter. The pharmacist legally needs to be involved in everything that happens in the pharmacy and everything that happens takes them away from finishing your prescription. Don't get me started on insurance rejects. Those can literally take all day.
This pretty much sums it up. It's irreverent, but it sums it up.
As for centralizing, we're doing that. Several chains (Walgreens and Wal-Mart come to mind) have invested in centralized pharmacies that fill maintenance meds with robots and deliver the filled prescriptions to the local pharmacy. They can fill thousands of scripts in a single night. It's a HUGE time saver when it works right (which it usually does).
As far as e-prescribing goes, all the pharmacies are on board and most of the doctors are coming around. it's usually a lot better than the illegible handwritten scripts. It just allows for new forms of stupid, though. I've gotten no shortage of prescriptions telling me that patients use their diabetic testing supplies orally. REALLY?
It's too bad this reply is going to get buried, but this hits pretty close to home. I work for a medium size multinational in an engineering/architecture capacity. Everyone within our division works very well together, and the problems only happen when things move outside that boundary. Especially at the first level of management, where you interface with individual contributors, knowing the job is essential. I've been on both sides of the fence as both a manager of a few junior engineers and the lead architect for our team. I've also had experience with horrible managers that have had no clue what happens on a daily basis, yet they have the MBAs and the power to make multimillion dollar decisions.
If your boss doesn't know at least in broad strokes what you do, you're bound to have a bad experience. When your boss has done your job in the past or is doing a share of the team's work, they will be able to talk intelligently with both their reports and their managers, and be the "group champion" that is needed at the first layer of management. Bosses who don't know anything about the work are the ones that agree to unrealistic deadlines or dumb design decisions, and whip their subordinates to get what they want done.
Nontechnical bosses drive technical people nuts. Remember I said everyone in our division works fine together? The next layer up from that in our company might as well be political appointees for all they know about the actual work performed. Unfortunately for everyone below, this is the level where key decisions are made, like offshoring vs. in-house development, hiring permatemps vs. FTEs, etc. Stuff that looks good in MBA-land and on spreadsheets, but doesn't work out in the real world. This is why the management consulting firms target the upper-middle management layer -- none of them have a clue about anything and need consultants to back decisions that they should have just asked their lower-level managers about.
How about a manager who has no idea why data redundancy in database for no good reason is a bad thing? Or management that insists on having 3k configuration options with 5 levels of overriding?
I can't count the number of times I've been handed deadlines or requirements by managers / directors who have absolutely no clue about software development. The first thing you always do is to read the requirements, this in 99.999% of all cases cause them to be thrown back across the table because they're lacking anything actual requirements, the second thing you do is to throw out the deadline and set your own.
My rule is that the software will take how ever long it will take and that's it. It's the same way in the IT world, when I do IT consulting, I don't set deadlines and I don't set budgets, the project will take however long it takes at how much I charge, which I factor in at the end.
Non technical managers have to understand that it's the developers and administrators who set the deadline and not the other way around, I'm not going to work in a compressed time frame with bad requirements because some guy in a suit decided to sell my project one month early.
WHAT you know is useful just to clear the Interview stage; Rest of your career depends on WHO you know.
Casteism
A few years ago, I worked at a company where a staffing shakeup sent the manager of the IT department (no, we didn't have a CIO) packing. The guy who was put in charge of herding us cats was a manager from Marketing who was called "Special Ed" by the MARKETING Department!
The poor man was eaten alive.
I firmly believe that both technical and non-technical management can work. It's all in how the workplace is arranged and how competent the manager themselves are.
On the positive side:
- a non-technical manager will tend to focus on matters non-technical and hopefully that means the customer experience and satisfaction;
- a technical manager will understand the issues and fix simple things quickly. They are also unlikely to be "snowed" by some techie who is trying to get away with something.
On the negative:
- a non-technical manager can try and delve into complex technical issues in the middle of a crisis when it isn't helpful, learning on the job;
- a technical manager is vulnerable to micro-managing or even doing the work themselves. This overloads the manager and removes learning opportunities from their staff.
One thing. Every high functioning non-technical manager I've ever seen, has had the "experienced, trusted lieutenant" system in place. They have staff they place a high degree of faith in and those staff come through in terms of performance. If the direct reports are incompetent, untrustworthy, or have other serious flaws in the workplace, then the non-technical manager is scr*wed.