As much as many people here won't like it, the lesson here is that there need to be strict limits on what kind of laws government is allowed to impose, period. You can't have some system where the government gets to have broad powers on things you agree with, but somehow isn't allowed to make laws about things you don't like. The only solution is being very narrow about what government can tell you to do. Personally, this law appears so ridiculous that I think existing checks and balances will have no problem rendering it irrelevant, but it should still be a warning about what government thinks it can impose on people.
Do you guys think that managers should have some tech background so they could assess any situation and get better decisions. I've been involved in a few projects were the lead senior developer was having difficult times with the manager. Any thoughts?
There’s only the minimal amount of knowledge needed. I think a manager is no different than a soccer manager. Their role is to train the player for the role they’re best fit for. A manager has to build a team with the right skill sets. And I don’t mean just technical skill sets. You coach the player during one on ones and give feedback, and then during game time, you maybe yell strategic advice but the ball is at their feet, they’re now autonomous unit that needs to work cohesively. A good manager gets out of the way and steps in only when necessary. The more coaching and autonomy is given the more your players develop. The more they develop the more they’re capable of doing, and the more time the manager can spend thinking about higher level ideas and goals. It’s a nice feedback cycle.
I do think when the team is more technical than the manager, he has to coach the team to communicate the useful information to him. It’s his job to be able to synthesize information and to ask questions that make the team think outside the scope of their work, try to find or tease out any gotchas. Lastly a manager should be aware of the impacts their teams work will have on others and intervene when he thinks something might go wrong.
It’s always positive when the manager has a very technical background or deep knowledge of the tech stack, but they should be aware of micro managing.
The other common issue was that the non-technicals didn't grasp the need for absolutes and specificity. One common issue revolved around dates.
So we would get a ticket that "such and such permission should expire at a reasonable time on the date specified." Reasonable time was not defined and it turned out to be whenever the particular thing closed.
They would also forgot to list exceptions to that expiration policy, which the people doing it manually would have seen on the post-its this system replaced.
Where I work, for larger projects, we have business analysts or product managers who are supposed to help with converting the user request into some sort of specification.
If the project is a smaller one, then the developer is supposed to be acting in an analyst-developer type role. In my fairly limited experience the analyst part tends to take a back seat in these smaller projects.
I believe, though people are free to disagree, that it’s on the people developing the solution to ensure it satisfies the users needs. If the user is jumping to a solution, then it’s up to the team to take a step back and ensure the problem has been satisfactorily defined.
Note: I work on internal business apps used in a large corporation, and I have never worked on consumer facing apps.
Yes, I've found that a useful way around this is to go back to the non-technical user and ask them why. Why do you want to do this? Why do you want to do this in this manner?
That usually either gives the implementor enough information to wholeheartedly agree with the proposed solution, or to suggest something more appropriate.
Good managers should focus on taking the best decisions they can with the available information. Sure if they have a tech background, some of that information is easier to process if technical, but good decisions rely on much more than just what is good in the opinion of the tech lead.
If a manager starts analyzing the technical information in front of them without the background to do so, they are missing the point. They should rely on the opinion of their more technical counterparts when the information is technical.
Yet, the opposite is also true, if a technical background person becomes manager and doesn't trust their accounting, finance, marketing counter part, then they wouldn't be a very good manager either.
The above assumes that the manager has a more general role and that decisions on technical topics isn't their only job. If yes, of course a technical background should be required.
If the manager simply does what the tech lead think is the best decision then the tech lead should be managing instead. If the manager makes technical decisions without knowing tech then he should be fired for incompetency.
I do think that, and (to paraphrase The Mythical Man-Month) I also think that it would be great to work on a small and focused team with a clear mandate and no legacy stakeholders to worry about. So do we all, but those circumstances are not usually available.
The interesting parts start to pop up when you need to make difficult choices. Good managers with a technical background are scarce and therefore not usually available. Sometimes you need to make a choice between a bad manager with a technical background, a good manager without a technical background and no manager at all. Whichever choice is made, it will never satisfy everyone.
If your manager has no power to decide what you work on, who gets promoted, what deadlines you should have, who is to blame when things go wrong, who to fire etc, then sure he doesn't need to be technical. Otherwise he will just promote and listen to the popular guys and fire the unpopular ones.
If that was truly the case, then why do so many engineers complain about having a non-technical manager? Thinking that a manager does not need even a little bit of domain knowledge is something managers tell themselves to feel good about themselves, but it is not actually true.
Both the people part _AND_ the technical parts are the hard parts of technical management.
My anecdotal experience with manager is either : they are useless and will rubber stamps things.
Or they are actually involved, then, you want someone that has a vague idea of the process of doing the work.
I vastly prefer someone who has produced code at some point. It’s fine if it was 10 years ago the last time it happen.
Tech lead vs manager.
A manager isn’t managing tech. It’s people and process.
Classic HN. I am not saying they shouldn’t have domain knowledge. That would be silly wouldn’t it. You know, context and all that.
They need to build and facilitate a team to be run by itself and arbitrate on difficult decisions, sell team, etc, etc.
That has been a divide I've experienced between senior devs and tech leads vs product owners and managers who were not technical. The former tend to be pessimistic and the latter optimistic.
It's easy to say that something that seems simple when explained in simple terms is easy or quick to implement, but the people 'at the coal face' are often all too aware of the implicit complications of the task.
Do you think a military commander should know anything about the military/weapons/etc.? Do you think a ship building manager should know anything about ships? Yes of course! It is a myth that you can have a manager managing something that he/she doesn’t understand. Without actually delegating their job to people who do (and then take the credit).
The managers without tech background are making bad decisions. But the advantage of tech background is not that you are able to assess any situation. It is more that you are less stupid and make less unenforced clueless basic mistaskes.
