This whole "should an IT manager have IT skills" thing has been on Slashdot plunty of times before. There's always the people that say if you dont' know what you're managing then how can you manage it? then there's always the people that all it takes to be a good manager is management skills, whatever set that may include.
If you ask me, it depends on what you expect out of the manager. Or really more importantly, it depends on what that manager's style of management is. A manager with no technical skills can manage IT great, if they are willing to regonize that they don't have IT skills and therefore place that much more level of trust in the suggestions and evaluations of the members of thier team that do. If you have a manager that wants to micromanage the technical detials and yet does NOT have the technical knowledge, I mean, of course, you're going to have a problem!
Likewise, as I was saying, if the manager has good management skills. If they listen to and place faith on what thier tech people tell them, then they're still going to be a good manager even if they don't nesscarly know the difference between stack and heap memory.
Of course, you might say its not possible for someone to have good management skills, and still want to micromanage the technology of something they don't understand. Well.. lets just say I don't know about that.
Come on, man, how can you not see the usefullness in this? Anytime you have a website that is serving the purpose of being a frontend to a big cross-linked database, like pretty much any kind of Wiki, you're going to run into keywords that can link to more then one thing.
I agree that context sensativity is great, and a fitting technology for this kind of situtation. However, I think that it should be used to effect the order of displayed multiple links. So that you'd still get a little pop-up list, but the more relevent would be at the time, followed by all the others. Having the program just 'decide' which is most relevent without even showing anything else is putting too much in the hands of the machine, which will be wrong on quite a few occasions I'm sure. Not to mention that in my opinion, context sensitivity smart enough to make this kind of decision would be really hard to impliment on a website. Then again, maybe that's just my ignorence talking.
Having put together a few "Wiki" style sites myself, I've used a feature like this to display multiple entries for a single linked keyword too. If I had known it was Slashdot frontpage material, I'd have submitted it back when I did it!
Slashdot Mirror
An SSID named "enter_and_your_hacked" is far too tempting to hack and fix the grammatical error.
This whole "should an IT manager have IT skills" thing has been on Slashdot plunty of times before. There's always the people that say if you dont' know what you're managing then how can you manage it? then there's always the people that all it takes to be a good manager is management skills, whatever set that may include.
If you ask me, it depends on what you expect out of the manager. Or really more importantly, it depends on what that manager's style of management is. A manager with no technical skills can manage IT great, if they are willing to regonize that they don't have IT skills and therefore place that much more level of trust in the suggestions and evaluations of the members of thier team that do. If you have a manager that wants to micromanage the technical detials and yet does NOT have the technical knowledge, I mean, of course, you're going to have a problem!
Likewise, as I was saying, if the manager has good management skills. If they listen to and place faith on what thier tech people tell them, then they're still going to be a good manager even if they don't nesscarly know the difference between stack and heap memory.
Of course, you might say its not possible for someone to have good management skills, and still want to micromanage the technology of something they don't understand. Well.. lets just say I don't know about that.
Come on, man, how can you not see the usefullness in this? Anytime you have a website that is serving the purpose of being a frontend to a big cross-linked database, like pretty much any kind of Wiki, you're going to run into keywords that can link to more then one thing. I agree that context sensativity is great, and a fitting technology for this kind of situtation. However, I think that it should be used to effect the order of displayed multiple links. So that you'd still get a little pop-up list, but the more relevent would be at the time, followed by all the others. Having the program just 'decide' which is most relevent without even showing anything else is putting too much in the hands of the machine, which will be wrong on quite a few occasions I'm sure. Not to mention that in my opinion, context sensitivity smart enough to make this kind of decision would be really hard to impliment on a website. Then again, maybe that's just my ignorence talking. Having put together a few "Wiki" style sites myself, I've used a feature like this to display multiple entries for a single linked keyword too. If I had known it was Slashdot frontpage material, I'd have submitted it back when I did it!