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Can a Manager Be a Techie and Survive?
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Nov 25, 2006 03:37 PM
from the pointy-hair-with-a-diploma dept.
from the pointy-hair-with-a-diploma dept.
theodp writes "Some say that good managers should not be technical at all. Over at Computerworld, 'C.J. Kelly' takes a contrarian position, arguing that managers should keep their hands on the technology. The ability to tell the difference between fiction and reality, says Kelly, is priceless." From the article: "If you don't know the difference between fiction and reality, you've got a problem. By being technically informed while managing people and projects, no one can blow smoke up my skirt. I can tell the difference between a lame excuse for a delay and a legitimate reason why something can't be done." Where do you fall on this issue? Is it nice to be able to flim-flam the boss once in a while? Or is the valuable input of a boss with a technical background worth the occasional all-nighter?
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It depends on your perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It depends on your perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
Not at all saying I'm a good manager, but I once asked someone to do something, and they explained to me very earnestly that it couldn't be done until some other guy did something (and that guy was gone for the weekend). Since "other guy" was way more junior, and this guy was very talented and generally very eager to tackle any task, I knew something was up, and it was -- his girlfriend was coming in from out of town about 20 minutes later and he wanted to get out of Dodge. That was when he was new (now he'd be like "dude, gf coming to town, can't do it now") but it does illustrate the scenario I'm presenting.
On the larger issue, I always like it when my managers have at least a vague clue about what I'm talking about. They don't need to know details, but they should get the general idea of what we do and how we do it.
Parent
Re:It depends on your perspective (Score:5, Funny)
Why ? Why take the productivity hit when there's such a massive pool of talented geek labour* that is never going to have this problem ?
*large parts of it reading right here...
Parent
Re:It depends on your perspective (Score:5, Funny)
Not only are they (for the most part) not going out looking for it, but the fact that the other half _is_ local (and waiting for them at home) actually seems to make them more likely to want to pull all-nighters.
[ me, cynical, nah !
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand, he should have asked you for more detail rather than accusing you of lying.
Some people like to ask open-ended questions to get you to stumble... like giving enough rope to hang yourself. The best way to fight this is to ask questions about what exactly
You don't manage engineers - you lead them (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, and often (especially with the non-IT types that often manage groups of programmers, and more especially in companies that do not primarily work in IT) that something that's wrong is that your boss is an idiot about computers. If someone doesn't need to (or can't) understand implementation details, then they are best protected from them - this is Encapsulatio
Re:Anecdote (Score:4, Insightful)
With large consultancies (or incestous corporate "partnerships") your project is often part of a multi-million dollar contract that basically says "we will look after your IT needs for five years in return for skimming the cream from your expenditure", for the deal to work the money MUST be spent in such a way that it lasts five years. From memory, the ideal "estimate" for a project comes in at -5% to +15% of the "real cost", ouside of that range too often and the PM is out of that nice corner office. This leads to the bizzare situations I have witnessed where one executive gets into deep shit for saving millions in costs and another gets a fat bonus for shuffling account numbers and playing solitaire.
I used quotes for "real costs" since the "real" part is only in the minds of accountants. Even the PM's I have admired would spend a considerable amount of time shuffling account numbers to ensure their projects come within the acceptable range regardless of reality. Without all this accounting bullshit a large chunk of the population could be doing something more usefull, OTOH, without it we wouldn't have built the pyramids in the first place.
Parent
Obviously, Yes! (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, come on! How much easier the lives of techies would be if their boss was one of them, if he would actually understand?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
A little bit of a problem there: the microsecond the boss lifts his hand to actually perform any technical task, the rest of the management team classifies him with the toilet-cleaner and never listens to him seriously again. There might be a few hyper-technical organizations where this isn't strictly true, but it is a fact for 95% of the employers out there.
sPh
The boss shouldn't do the coding. (Score:5, Insightful)
The manager should be sufficiently aware of the organization's culture to know that ahead of time.
It isn't necessary for him to do any of the actual coding. But he needs to be able to explain to the other managers why, with the current people / money / time / equipment / deadlines / other projects, the IT team will not be able to hit the deadline of the new project.
Then it gets into negotiating with the other managers for more people / money / equipment
The manager's job is to understand the business and the technology sufficiently well that he is able to communicate the business's IT requirements to the coders and provide them with the resources necessary to achieve those requirements in the time allocated.
It's a simple definition, but it's been useful for me. It also allows you to see where the "bad" managers have problems.
#1. They don't understand the business and the team gets stress for delivering tech that isn't appropriate.
#2. They don't understand the tech and over-promise what can be delivered.
#3. They don't understand the business or the tech.
#4. They don't communicate the requirements to the coders.
#5. They don't provide the resources the coders need.
etc.
It's difficult to fail if your manager is competent at each of those steps. But not impossible. There can still be personal issues that cause conflicts/problems.
But the chance of failure goes up dramatically with each step that the manager fails.
Parent
Re:Obviously, Yes! (Score:5, Insightful)
Management and programming/system administration are two totally different things. If you are a manager, do you job and manage.
Parent
Re:Obviously, Yes! (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes, in the case of managers with particularly stunted emotional makeup, you'll find them attempting to use their managerial position to prove themselves as technical geniuses, to the detriment of the people on their team.
While it may be beneficial in theory to have a technically savvy manager, in practice it's very dependent on the person. Most tech people don't have the emotional makeup required to successfully manage.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Obviously, Yes! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Obviously, Yes! However.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Definitely true on the most senior levels. (Score:5, Informative)
- The CEO of the national rail system, Hartmut Mehdorn [wikipedia.org], is a Mechanical Engineer.
- famously, Ron Sommer [wikipedia.org], the former CEO of Deutsche Telekom (think T-Mobile in the states) is a very gifted Mathematician.
- Dieter Zetsche [wikipedia.org], the CEO of Daimler Chrysler has a PhD in Engineering (hence "Dr. Z.").
- Ferdinan Piech [wikipedia.org], the head of Volkswagen, studied mechanical engineering in Zurich and is a grandson of the archetype of the German Engineer, Ferdinand Porsche (who, before anyone corrects me, was, arguably, Czech, Austrian or German).
- Speaking of which, the CEO of Porsche, Wendelin Wiedeking [wikipedia.org] has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering.
The list continues for companies like the chemistry and pharma giant BASF (Jürgen Hambrecht, a chemist), SAP (all its founders, Hasso Plattner, Hans-Werner Hector, Klaus Tschira and Dietmar Hopp are either Physicists or Mathematicians), ThyssenKrupp (Ekkehard Schulz, a mining engineer), Robert Bosch Inc. (Hermann Scholl, an electrical engineer) and so on. Bear in mind we're not talking about people who directed their companies as startups like Microsoft or Apple, but CEOs of companies who already where global players before they joined (or were even born).So, although these people probably qualify more as "leaders" than as managers, it is obviously possible to be a good techie and run a big company at the same time.
Parent
Could be wonderful, could be a disaster... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Every company, situation, boss, and team is different. None of the variables need be set in stone - it's all about the group dynamic and how they work together.
And some bosses are just assholes, a
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"One boss might be non-technical, but he chooses competent employees/team members and trusts their opinion"
He/she/it cant know if competency was chosen, or smoke blowing.
"Another boss might have a bad team, but is technical enough to know where things should head"
And if he/she/it is not technical, then there will be trouble.
In either case, having technical grounding will help with the evaluation of the situation.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
now if s/he is saying "you have to do it this way or else" then its time to gather everyone on your team and rebel against your manager. this doesn't mean ignoring what s/he says, or thinking of him/her as less of a manager, but sitting down in a meeting and laying down all the good points and bad points of his plan (either s/he will see how the bad far outweighs the good, or you will actually realize its a good idea. i've seen bot
Assuming.. (Score:2, Insightful)
In smaller shops, IT Managers absolutely have to have the technical knowledge because without it stuff won't get done - small IT M
Who says that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who says that? Some people say that if you shove your fingers up your nose and blow, you'll increase your IQ. Some people say
Can we just stop with the "some people say
If you're a tech manager and you lack the technical knowledge, how will you be able to determine which approach is viable or even realistic?
And don't tell me that you'd rely upon your staff. How do you know if your staff is any more technically proficient than you are? What happens when two people on your staff have contradicting approaches to a situation? Do you just flip a coin? Or do you go with the one that's been kissing your ass the best in the past week?
If you're a manager, it means that you have the responsibility to understand BOTH aspects. The technology and the business. That's why you're paid more. That's why you were hired.
If you can't handle both, then turn the job over to someone who can and find yourself a job more appropriate to your skill set.
Do we really need another article on this when Dilbert cartoons have been around for so long?
Re:Who says that? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Stepping onto campus, I had little interest in management roles, as they did not seem interesting (and presumably did not require technical ability). After several co-ops, I developed a respect for those who had both an extensive mastery of a technical field as well as the ability to earn the trust of and successfully coordinate teams of engineers, scientists, etc.
It's hard work IMHO, to manage an intelligent team. You have to dive in the psyche of
Only bad if they mind not getting things done (Score:3, Insightful)
So the answer is really that a manager can't really be a t
unavailable (Score:2)
Re:unavailable (Score:4, Funny)
Yes indeed, "The Peter Principle", from Dr. Laurence J. Peter's 1968 book of the same name. Technically, this has nothing to do with some managers being dicks but in practice it does seem that way.
Parent
a Tech Mgr or Mgr of Tech?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: a Tech Mgr or Mgr of Tech?? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's all a matter of personality, I think. A good techie is not necessarily cut out for management, and not all managers are cut out to understand the underlying technology they're managing in any real depth.
Parent
Re: a Tech Mgr or Mgr of Tech?? (Score:5, Informative)
You are a manager with little tech knowledge
You are a techie with little management knowledge
The problem with the tech managers you had is that they just didn't know enough about how to manage or had enough management experience. They believed that all techies are just like them. That TRAIT, is a problem. And while it may be beneficial to be managed by a non-techie, the company may suffer overall because the manager does not know how to drive his team.
I am CEO/owner of a 25 person (successful, profitable and fast growing) Internet company and my best managers are both comfortable being in a management role and are very smart in the area they manage. A good manager knows the capabilities of his/her team and also knows what they don't know and helps them learn it. Instead of resigning ourselves to be as weak as our weakest link, we teach that we need to be as strong as our strongest link and we have created a teaching and learning environment. This doesn't work if the manager doesn't understand much of the tech him/herself.
The result? Many people think our company is 2-4x as large as it actually is. We have an environment where everybody loves coming to work. There is a huge amount of respect for our managers and there is constant praise both from managers, from the teams and across team boundaries. We love our work, we work hard and in our case, our tech managers were actually all techies first but they have received guidance on how to be a good manager. I don't think a really good manager can be just either/or.
This is a philosophy I have personally taken throughout my life. I came out of business school from marketing (though most of my best marketing knowledge I learned through books), but also am a programmer (wrote most of our original code), graphic designer (owned a design co) and was CTO for another Internet company. The more I know about my business as a whole, the better I can run my company.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Hey, is that you Ted? You're back!!! http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert- 20061113.html [dilbert.com]
Don't step in the leadership (Score:2)
One example (Score:5, Funny)
They were all working hard down at Cape Canaveral getting ready to launch a satellite (an old HS-376). The boss came by and asked how things were going and one of the guys said that they were stuck on a problem and needed some parts. The boss eagerly got involved because this was something that he knew he could handle. They sent him to Radio Shack (Titusville) and had him ask for some polarized resistors. He took it in stride and did not get too upset when he came back (red faced) without them. It must have been very humbling for him.
JSL
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
We've all seen this. (Score:2)
I think it's great if a manager keeps up on technology, but once you're a manager, don't step on your workers' job responsibilities. I once had a manager who would constantly say things like "When I was doing it, I always did it this way. Try that." Yeah, that's nice and all that, but when you were doing it, the kernel was at level 2.0.13. Things have changed enough that the way you used to do it no longe
Sad State (Score:4, Insightful)
Is it nice to be able to flim-flam the boss once in a while?
I'm sorry, but the fact that anyone would even consider this paints a very sad picture of society.
Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't expect my bosses to know how to program Python, but they at least have to know what the technology is, how it works, and preferably at least how to read/interpret it.
Of course, in smaller teams, your manager is probably coding with you. Not every group can have a hands-off manager. However, if this is the case, the manager does need to ensure his role is maintained as manager, and not simply a developer. Managers need to insulate their team from stupid ideas, demands, and pet projects from higher levels of management.
Best of all, a manager that really does know the underlying technology will protect his job better. He might not have to program, but he could if he wanted to. Then he is telling the truth when he tells a manager that the "Project was possible, we just didn't have the talent for it."
Ideally managers should be very blunt, too, but that's just a personal preference. Where I work now, for instance, the managers are all-but-silent except during your yearly review. They then present a binder (not just a folder...) of your performance through the year. You may have sucked for 8 months, but they won't tell you til that review, and by then it is probably too late. I'd rather know that I suck sooner than later. Tech-savy managers could make that happen easier.
Technically competent managers are needed by all (Score:5, Insightful)
Incompetent managers can cause dilbertesque levels of insanity in technology just as much as anywhere else. I've seen managers so incompetent that they have led multimillion dollar projects straight into the ground through sheer ineptitude.
I recall one 100 million dollar plus project I was brought in on where a manager believed the vendor when they said you didn't need a single desktop technician to migrate tens of thousands of desktops. Needless to say that manager lost their job and the vender was sued for millions.
The manager needs to know enough to know what's needed for the department to do it's job, to know what to ask for it from venders and upper management. I've seen an it manager approve money for expensive inkjets because they like the pictures without leaving any money in the budget to replace a five year old server on it's last legs. I shouldn't have to explain to a manager that tape drives really do cost much and that a failed unit really needs replaced /now/!
Upper Management needs someone that can make that kind of decision correctly, they rely heavily on management's opinions for purchasing. The user base needs someone that isn't going to be snowed by a vendor with a dog and pony show. The techs need someone that knows what tools they need to do their job.
The job of management is to be an abstraction layer that interfaces between workers and upper management. They need to know enough about the job being done by their employees to do that.
Yes and no (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a double edged sword. Non-technical managers might not understand the importance of technical details/problems, but technical managers might end up micromanaging [wikipedia.org]. Personally I believe it all comes down to trust (and hence personality). The best managers are those that are technically competent but trust their team to make the correct judgements without the managers input. The worst are managers that are technically competent but want to make every decision for the team. Engineers *need* to have creative input and make decisions in order to be happy in their roles. Non-technical managers are in-between - they are forced to trust their team, but might not understand the pros and cons of important technical decisions.
Like it or not, those "difficult to quantise" aspects of running a technical project (such as personality) can make or break it. Surviving as a techie manager depends 100% on your personality. Put your trust in your team.
Here's an example (Score:5, Informative)
By being technically informed while managing people and projects, no one can blow smoke up my skirt. I can tell the difference between a lame excuse for a delay and a legitimate reason why something can't be done. That ability is priceless.
If your people blows smoke up your ass then you need to work on your management skills. Regardless that you can detect their lame excuses - if they feel the need to give a lame excuse then it's not only them that's doing a poor job - you are as well.
Technical Manager (Score:3, Insightful)
A Technical Manager, such as a project manager, must know a lot about technology and use it actively in practice, otherwise they are just wasting the programmers's time by asking stupid questions and giving bad directions. A General Manager in an IT business need not have much grasp of technical matters except excellent appreciation of the concepts involved (e.g. they ought to know about information systems), but I would still recommend some weekend coding even to a general manager, especially if they participate in hiring decisions.
I personally am a holder of a BSc(Hons) in Computer Science and I am now studying towards an MSc in Management, while I work as an Analyst Programmer on European Union projects and contribute to open-source. It's not all bad: Techies can certainly become good managers if they try, but I guess it all depends on why one decided to go to business school.
Hi, Sys Admin to Director over here... (Score:4, Interesting)
1) I side with my "guys" (who are
2) I have a nagging feeling I could "do that better" than they're doing it.
Sounds fun, or funny but it's not. It's a pain in the ass. It literally triples my stress levels.
There is no doubt in my mind that being a Sys Admin was a MUCH easier job.
What are the qualifications of a manager? (Score:3, Interesting)
It makes sense for managers to come to IT the way they come to most other professions. You are competent in the basics of the profession, and then you move up to supervisory positions, work well at that, then become a manager. I understand that it is sometimes harder for that to happen in IT because the people drawn to the IT profession are not necessarily heavy in the traits that are valued in managers, but it is still a much better proposition than taking someone who has never owned or used a computer in his life and putting him in charge of IT for a company. I'd like to say that was unusual, but almost every large company I've worked for has had a level at the VP level that had never done anything on a computer other than word processing, or if they were an expert, maybe Power Point.
The question isn't whether a manager can be a techie and survive, the question is why can so many be non-technical and survive, when every other profession has a massive affinity for managers being competent workers in what they manage?
What do you mean by a manager? (Score:3, Insightful)
So: Direct supervisors of tech staff should have tech skills, but at some level above them in the organization, tech skills give way in importance to management and business skills.
This leads to question #2: What do you mean by survive? No doubt an ambitious manager would like to see a clear promotion path all the way up to the CEO level. I don't think tech skills are a liability to achieving this, but once you cross the threshold from supervisory to executive management, those tech skills are not worth much any more. If you have to spend a lot of energy maintaining the techie side of your brain, you are presumably detracting from the amount of time you can spend polishing your executive skills. And this makes you less promotable than someone without this distraction.
So: Can you survive? Yes, you can do very well as a supervisor of techies, but insisting on a robust set of tech skills may cost you as an executive.
-Graham
For what its worth... (Score:4, Insightful)
My most memorable experience in engineering came upon joining a group of people, all very techie, who were a group of radio amateurs doing what they liked to do - namely - tinkering with RF.
It was a helluva "job", if you can call it that. "Lifestyle" was more the word for me.
It was the kind of thing you couldn't wait to get to the lab. I bought my house really close so I could minimize the time I had to do such nuisance things like eating or sleeping. All my "toys" were at the lab. The house was more like somewhere I went when I had to go to sleep. I would have gladly slept at the lab if there were somewhere to do it. Yeh - true-blue nerd. I was just as addicted to my RF toys as gamers are to games.
I had the best boss imaginable. A wizard of all things. That guy knew everything. But he just had one set of hands and that was a severe limition to him. I'd gladly be his hands if he would just show me how all this stuff worked. He had a really uncanny understanding of how stuff worked. I almost say I had religious experiences just talking to this guy. Its just the way he could explain fields and energy flows in such a graphical nature.
A big corporation bought us out one day.
They brought in their Masters of Business Degree managers, well schooled in the motivational theories and executive management skills, but didn't know much of a damn about how anything worked. Working for them was hell.
I soon found I anxiously awaited going-home time and weekends. I soon found why they called it "work". It wasn't fun anymore. It was hell.
I found myself surrounded by people making far more money than anyone I had ever seen make, yet they were completely ignorant of what we did. Only thing they seemed to care about were schedules and what software and tools we were going to be allowed to use. They set themselves up with altars and the rest of us now had the onus of paying homage to these altars, telling the holy priests of the altar what they wanted to hear, or we would be excommunicated as "not being a team player". The old paradigms of knowing what one was doing did not seem germane anymore. We were just supposed to "point and click". A lot of us had to go. I was financially insecure, so I hung on a bit longer and got laid off.
I see two schools of thought here. Whether one aligns himself with the ability to do or the ability to control.
I guess its like supplying water to a city....are you a pump or a valve?
Companies with an overabundance of creativity may want to throttle it back by hiring people to tell the creative people that they can't use the tools they like.
Newly forming companies may want to open the creativity spigots wide open and clear our all obstructions to generate the most possible throughput.
Its a cycle seen in all of nature - things get old, and are replaced with new things. Millions of seedlings are nourished by the rot of one big dead tree.
I am quite aware that quite a few very innovative companies arose from our "corpse".
I am of the belief that in younger growing companies, the manager is a mentor, that can do everything, yet due to time constraints, has to bring in more hands to do the work, and he personally mentors them.
In larger, more mature companies, which do not need the growth, the manager does not need to know what the people do. By now, its a commodity thing, he just has to look at numbers. Who can make the cheapest aspirin...
Relevant knowledge is never bad (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems obvious to me that a manager who understands what his people are doing will be more successful. BUT there are a few provisos that might blur the issue:
1. A "techie" manager must be able to resist the temptation to get sucked into micromanaging or - worse still - trying to compete with his own team. Instead, he should be mature enough to let people learn and grow, even if they must make mistakes in the process (and no one learns without a few mistakes).
2. As others have noted, not even the most gifted and expert techie knows it all. The manager must realise that, even in his own field of expertise, other opinions are valid - and sometimes might be better than his own.
3. Unless he is able to stay current (which is unlikely if he is doing his current job properly), a manager must always be careful to allow for the time that has passed since he was an active practitioner. The state of the art ten years ago is apt to be laughably obsolete today, especially in fast-changing fields like IT. (On the other hand, wisdom of the type contained in "The Mythical Man-Month", for instance, is just as relevant as it ever was).
4. A manager needs to be able to switch communication modes when talking to non-techies. Even a CIO will be unsuccessful if the other CxOs are baffled by what they they perceive as his "technical mumbo-jumbo". It is essential to talk each person's own language, stay within their comfort zones, and reason in ways they can appreciate and follow.
5. Even if technical knowledge is very desirable, it is not the most important attribute of a good manager. Leadership, the ability to listen and understand, team building, and sensitivity have to come first. Far better a seasoned, sympathetic manager from a different industry than a stubborn, micro-managing, blinkered techie whose ideas have passed their sell-by date.
No (Score:3, Insightful)
The idea of having a PM is so you can leave the tech people alone doing their thing and not having to worry about scheduling and other non technical work. The best PMs I have worked with were not technically impaired, in fact they were geeks but within the scope of the project they acted as if they did not know a thing about it. This is why they worked out so well, they could talk to the client just fine, but did not get lost whenever talking to one of the programmers for more than 5 minutes.
I also had PMs that had absolutely no technical knowledge, but they understood the goals, had a very good relationship with the client and they listened to us. Project makes it on budget, client is happy, programmers don't hate the project or the PM, the PM still has all of his hair and did not turn into an alcoholic so everyone wins.
The two biggest problems with project managers, something that has not changed in the past 15 years or so:
1. Prima donna customers.
2. Prima donna programmers.
Not much you can do about #1, since these customers usually hold a lot of cash that you want to push your way. As for #2, you will be amazed at how much nicer it is to deal with the PMs if you (I am going to include myself in this one, guilty as charged) bump down the attitude from a 12 (on a ten scale) to maybe a 9.5.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
--S