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?
It depends on your perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Could be wonderful, could be a disaster... (Score:4, Insightful)
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 Manager are expected to help carry the workload whilst mentoring the people under them. Even if your not in IT management, having some technical knowledge is good to keep the IT Manager in check - I've seen IT Managers who couldn't configure a RAID array, but they knew the lingo well enough to keep the business at arms length and slowly spiral the department into the toilet.
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?
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.
Thoughts. (Score:1, Insightful)
The issue is personal. As it's said, the more someone knows, the more they realize they don't know. If that were universally the case, we'd never have stupid management decisions.
Instead, many people learn just enough to be dangerous, and then promulgate a potentially erroneous view with a vigor that overcomes all competing options. The cause is either 1) a lack of desire to learn more, 2) a lack of realization there is more to know, or 3) a personal stake, be it pride or otherwise.
The ComputerWorld article seems to be black and white; knowledge is good or bad. But like everything else, the true answer depends entirely on the makeup of the person wielding it.
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.
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.
Re:Could be wonderful, could be a disaster... (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 both happen). you must do this THE FIRST FEW TIMES they throw out outlandish comments,suggestions, deliverables. otherwise you give your new manager upper hand and future revolts will not go over so well.
additionally, psychology comes into play. find out what s/he likes, chat it up with them, go to lunch with them on occasion. get to know the person and then use it to your advantage. if you're good around women, use the same tactics with your managers (play on the warm fuzzy feelings, avoiding the cold pricklies. it doesn't matter what you say, it matters how they respond to what you say). if you're a hermit.. well, you'll probably just end up on slashdot complaining about your manager
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.
Re:At the end of the day. (Score:3, Insightful)
--S
Point of view (Score:2, Insightful)
Every time I see one of these management articles/questions on Slashdot, I wonder from which perspective many posters are commenting. If each poster was tagged "have been in management" or "have never been in management", I think that would make for very interesting reading...
Disclaimer: have been in management (goodbye karma)
Re:Could be wonderful, could be a disaster... (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.
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.
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.
Re:Who says that? (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 each member and figure out what motivates them, what they are good at, what they want to learn more about, etc.
Re:Obviously, Yes! However.... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Who says that? (Score:1, Insightful)
And I couldn't agree more on the salary part too: I mean you get more for KNOWING more, right? You are more valuable to the organization and thus you get compensated for it accordingly. However I see it way too often when people get promoted who have no idea what they are doing. But when confronted they explain that they are super-good in delegation... that they surround themselves with "good people..." blah-blah-blah... Hmm, how do you delegate if you don't know the aspects that you need a person for? Explain me this or just admit you experienced a lucky break with your position and you are completely clueless...
By the way, I am a manager (mid-level) and not a bitter floor-level person. I think America needs a wake up call on the quality of management today--the old days had its glory when managers were competent and educated. Today they are mostly gum-flapping show clowns with no real knowledge about life or their subject matter.
That's just my $.02 --- now shoot me.
Re:Obviously, Yes! (Score:2, Insightful)
As a manager who is technical at a FTSE 250 company, it is common that employees who are behind and/or not skilled enough to carry out a request cry micro-management when they are questioned on activity list detail. I would suggest that you give updates on progress before being asked, to get us tech-manager types off of your ass.
Remember your output as a team member reflects on the entire team and the team's management. IT in exec management's eyes is always assumed to fail whatever project they are on, thanks to poor project management and/or management in general, therefore a lot pressure is on whoever is responsible for IT to perform.
As far as your comment about most tech people don't have the emotional makeup required to successfully manage teams, may be true. However, that same group of people usually don't think beyond their cubicle they are sitting in as well. IT is very social as your work output generally impacts the entire business you are in, and good social skills take one a lot farther in IT than coding behind a desk for 16 hours a day.
Re:Could be wonderful, could be a disaster... (Score:2, Insightful)
Just my two cents - deep in the front-line of personal experience.
Cally
Re:It depends on your perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
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 techie, but a manager should be a former techie.
Also, a manager only needs a good approximation (but it can't be a bad approximation) of skill in the field. There's a level of skill where you can't solve a problem yourself, but you know whether it's fundamentally impossible, impractical, or just difficult, and that's ideal for a manager. (The worst thing is if the manager knows the problem can be solved, but nobody else on the team is good enough to solve it and the manager is too busy.)
Of course there's also the Peter Principle; there are plenty of cases of techies without any management skill at all promoted to management positions on the basis of seniority and great technical skill, such that they don't have the necessary skills for their actual job, are too valuable to let go or demote, and don't have the time to do the work they are better at than anyone else.
Re:Obviously, Yes! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It depends on your perspective (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Obviously, Yes! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It depends on your perspective (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 they want to know and into what detail. Another trick is to look at you quietly after you've talking. Most people will be uncomfortable with the silence and will start talking again. In an interview, this is usually where the good stuff comes out. "Does that answer you question?" is a good way to difuse it, or "would you like more detail?"
He sounds like a jerk and you're probably better off not there anyway.
Re:Hi, Sys Admin to Director over here... (Score:1, Insightful)
If it wasn't, I'd be questioning why you earn so much more than a sysadmin.
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
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.
You don't manage engineers - you lead them (Score:3, Insightful)
Doubt that? I am no "Apple Groupie" (I'm a *nix head), but you need to look no further than Steve Jobs for living proof of its power.
Thanks for listening.
G
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...
Re:Hi, Sys Admin to Director over here... (Score:2, Insightful)
The questions are:
can they do it well enough?
do they know what well enough is?
do they know what it is?
do they know when it has to be done?
do they know why it (their work) is important?
These are the things that matter
Your staff will probably do it differently too!
I don' know much, mon... (Score:2, Insightful)
It boggles me that so many of us describe managers as 'the other'. I am just a guy who was kinda good at the work, and kinda good at getting along with people, and kinda good at taking the lead when something needed doing. In a lot of cases, my having some skill in the biz caused projects to move much more expeditiously, because the doers didn't need to take 2 hours and 45 powerpoint slides to convince me that we needed a certain server configuration. My team members have, to my knowledge, usually regarded this as a Good Thing, as it shortened their day and simplified their lives.
Why would you NOT want a manager that can understand what you are trying to talk about? How could that make your life better? The examples discussed above, of micromanaging, are not criticisms of technical expretise, they are criticisms of micro managers. Of course it's better to have a tehcnically incompetent micro-managing boss (so you can frooze them), but that begs the question of whether a technically knowledgable -competent- boss is worse than a technically ignorant -competent- boss. Having had both, I will modestly suggest that a career is easier and more fun, when you and your team can talk on the same terms. Dontcha think Bill Gates or Linus Torvalds would be more satisfying to have as bosses than Jack Welch or (shudder) Oprah?
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.