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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'.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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 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.
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.
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.
... 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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Wrong kind of "financial manager".
TFA doesn't mean that as some sort of investment advisor, but rather, a manager over an accounting department (or a subspecialty thereof, for a large enough company).
In fairness, though, I do agree that makes a bad example, because in accounting, you have the skill levels across the corporate food-chain almost entirely inverted from IT - Companies tend to hire unskilled minimum wage people for the "boots on the ground" accounting functions, and trust a handful of people in the upper tiers of the department to make sure the work meets the various applicable regulatory requirements. No sane company would ever hire a generic MBA as their treasurer, even though in theory that job doesn't need to "do" anything but delegate to team leads.
In IT, by contrast, you simply don't have any unskilled doers (aside from the deadweights like the owner's nephew that everyone goes out of their way to give shiny but harmless projects to); yet two or three levels up the ladder, you have people who don't know a browser from a file manager (damn you, Microsoft, for putting the word "Explorer" in both their names!).
And that, I think, leads to the real reason we have a problem here - In most aspects of a modern business, the structure matches the accounting department - Peons in the field, and actual accountants near the top. Businesses really don't have any traditional frame of reference for how to manage some of the most highly skilled people in the company as bottom-tier employees. Sure, they understand that they need to throw money at us, but aside from that, most companies still try to treat IT as the equivalent of cashiers or delivery drivers or AP entry clerks. Even in the other "skilled" trades, people usually progress up the food chain based on experience. The grunts haul pipe / pull wire / etc, the apprentices get the easy-but-unpleasant tasks, the journeymen get to do most of the actual work, and the masters plan out how to make the project as a whole successful. You just don't have any useful positions below the "journeymen" skill level in an IT department (aside from interns, but most companies treat them as little more than either welfare cases or slave labor, they certainly don't plan to put anything an intern does into production).
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.