Can a Manager Be a Techie and Survive? 238
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?
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.
Re:Could be wonderful, could be a disaster... (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, and it won't matter how much tech experience they have.
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.
Liars are a liability. (Score:2, Informative)
The technical savvy or character judgement of your management should not be the factor that determines your integrity.
While it is important to have a manager that can "read" people, agreed, it is equally important to have technical people that you can trust. A manager, while he should be a good read of people, is there more so to be a leader and manage the direction of the company, and make sure his employees are in a position to work toward that. The ability to read a lie is important when it comes to negotiating contracts, dealing with purchasing, and speaking with customers; having solid contract-writers and lawyers are insurance in case that ability lapses. Exposing the lies of his employees should not be a skill that a manager must regularly exercise, but I admit that is only in an ideal world. Given this is not an ideal world, and given that the Slashdot poster of the article framed this in context of the collective Slashdot community, I will approach this more as advice for those who bridged their hands and got a knowing grin when they read that last line, and for those new managers who are dealing with folks who might be prone to doing this.
A worker who is willing to lie in order to have their own pursuits usually has questionable ethics (or has a really, really poor manager who they really cannot be honest with.) In your particular situation, that a person new to the company would falsely pinpoint another member of the team as holding up production (even if that other individual had a good, excused reason to do so), should be a red flag. (And further, that people new to a company commonly find it acceptable to "get out of Dodge" instead of putting in the necessary time when he is ultimately on a trial and there to prove that hiring him was a good decision, although certainly not a fireable offense, is a topic for another time.)
Although not too serious if the project really could wait, and it is true that everyone makes mistakes on occasion that may be forgiven, but he made the dangerous first step down a bad road of not being trustworthy and furthermore toward becoming a liability. An honest worker shouldn't dishonestly leverage other workers' situations, especially someone more junior to themselves, in order for them to achieve their own pursuits. Lying to your face, whether you have the ability to determine those lies or not, was even more offensive. That was disrespectful of you and to the junior gentleman. You are fortunate in that, considering he is still with you, he appears to have just made a mistake in judgment and has probably come to be a reliable worker. Everyone makes a mistake now and again, but there are consequences to those mistakes. He is fortunate that you are a good enough manager to understand that personal fulfillment is important, and will let him off to see his girlfriend, and that you would give him another chance, as you should have; perhaps he came from a company where this wasn't true, where one "has" to lie in order to not see the company die, and thus that was his reasoning for lying to your face.
I know it doesn't seem so this day in age where lies here and there seem to be the norm, but in the case of an engineer (which I suspect many people here on Slashdot are), integrity is often all that he has to give confidence to his customer or boss that he can competently complete the job, and that the risk in giving him a sum of money and time in which to do a job is worth it.
If you become someone who is known to lie for their own purposes, then you can't be surprised when your input means diddley squat to the people making the decisions. Or when you're jobless.
And when you have lied until your management are in the ninth circle of cluelessness, you cannot wonder why decisions that make absolutely no sense are being made, and some serious consequences (a complete wipe of the technical st
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.