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Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise

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Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise

#241

Post by TallGuyShort »

vorg wrote: post #187
TallGuyShort wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think there's a balance here. One of my favorite managers also didn't understand my project (although he did understand software engineering in general) and I later found out everyone else hated him. I've seen what I suspect is similar later: managers who just see their job as defending their team. Someone needs something from the team? Push back. Their teams needs something? Hound those responsible. Team has…

You'd be lucky in software engineering if your non-technical manager sees their job as just defending their team. Someone needs something from the team? Push the team to give it to them. Their teams needs something? Give excuses on behalf of higher management but take all the flak from your employees for the excuses. Team has an opinion? Promote upper management's opinion as undisputed truth. Does have ability to rec…

Agreed - I guess what I'm trying to say is if you have a boss who doesn't understand the technicalities and won't understand them, this kind of manager is the best-case scenario. Certainly there are worse managers, but there are fundamental limitations preventing them from becoming better.

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise

#242

Post by analog31 »

eli wrote: post #222
analog31 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hypothesis is that the MBA degree is largely valued by other people with MBA degrees, so you have pockets of high MBA concentration that grow within specific businesses. MBA's hire other MBA's, but also encourage their most promising subordinates to get MBA's.

You don't think any of the skills needed to manage people or businesses can be taught in school? I feel very fortunate that one of my cofounders has an MBA. We'd be much worse off if I had to build financial models and negotiate contracts and motivate the team myself. Having an MBA obviously doesn't automatically qualify you to manage a dev team (nor does being a good engineer), but speaking from my first hand experi…

I think the ability to manage either people or businesses varies all over the map, and between techies and MBA's, maybe it's like a pair of overlapping distributions. For managing people, I think that there are both positive and negative skills, and I'm not sure MBA's learn exclusively one kind in the absence of the other. Stack ranking and open plan offices had to have come from somewhere.

Negotiating contracts is win-lose, so it's at best a coin toss.

I could see certain tasks being performed by someone who has shown a motivation to learn how, such as making business plans, schedules, and contracts. The MBA's at my workplace are certainly busy. But it could be selection bias: People with MBA's are selected from among people who want to learn those skills.

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise

#243

Post by dahauns »

dagw wrote: post #233
dahauns wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those aren't mere "implementation details". Those are aspects that influence the whole process, up to strategic decisions.

How do you figure? Why should my boss care about unit test frameworks and the relative merits of various TDD strategies. If he has some useful advice from previous projects then great. But otherwise, as long has we aren't having major problems, I don't expect him to interfere with those sorts of decisions. And if we are having major problems I expect him to sit the relevant people down and go "look, we're having too…

It's not about specific unit test frameworks or TDD strategies. It's about the fact that thirty years ago, for all intents and purposes, there was no such thing as "unit test frameworks" or "test driven development".

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise

#244

Post by kamaal »

pjungwir wrote: post #136
sage76 wrote: post #110

At a unicorn I was working at, MBAs were being hired to be engineering managers. I did not see a single engineer promoted to management, it was mostly all MBAs. The few I had direct contact were really useless at helping engineers out, all I ever heard from them was "Just get it done.". If I asked for help, they'd say "Well who else is gonna do it then?". I felt demoralised and lost some of my confidence. But the com…

One of my in-laws is a geologist who works for the oil companies, and he tells me in that industry almost all the big executives are engineers. Since he's been in the news, take Rex Tillerson. His degree is in engineering. Or take any of "the professions": law, accounting, medicine, business consulting, engineering firms. In all those cases you have "partners" who have moved into sales and management. Sometimes they…

Unlike programming/software engineering most engineering managers in other domains have other work to do than just approve leaves/vacations and forward emails.

You can't do real work without real experience.

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise

#245

Post by dagw »

dahauns wrote: post #243
dagw wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you figure? Why should my boss care about unit test frameworks and the relative merits of various TDD strategies. If he has some useful advice from previous projects then great. But otherwise, as long has we aren't having major problems, I don't expect him to interfere with those sorts of decisions. And if we are having major problems I expect him to sit the relevant people down and go "look, we're having too…

It's not about specific unit test frameworks or TDD strategies. It's about the fact that thirty years ago, for all intents and purposes, there was no such thing as "unit test frameworks" or "test driven development".

It's about the fact that thirty years ago, for all intents and purposes, there was no such thing as "unit test frameworks" or "test driven development".

Even if your boss has manged to get to today without even hearing about these concepts, hopefully there are other people on the team that have. And those people will decide on a testing strategy for the project. If your boss understand the details of that decision or not is isn't that important. What's important is that he lets the best people in room make the decision. Now if your boss decides to override and ignore those people, then that can be a problem, but that is problem due to a lack of managerial and people skills, not a problem due to a lack of technical skills.

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise

#246

Post by dahauns »

dagw wrote: post #245
dahauns wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about specific unit test frameworks or TDD strategies. It's about the fact that thirty years ago, for all intents and purposes, there was no such thing as "unit test frameworks" or "test driven development".

It's about the fact that thirty years ago, for all intents and purposes, there was no such thing as "unit test frameworks" or "test driven development". Even if your boss has manged to get to today without even hearing about these concepts, hopefully there are other people on the team that have. And those people will decide on a testing strategy for the project. If your boss understand the details of that decision or…

That's cute. Too bad when the project timeline doesn't fit, the teams themselves don't fit, etc. etc. Yeah, team members can decide all they want when they don't have any resources to work with, because the primary strategic decisions didn't account for the workflows people had in mind. And yes, I've seen that happen to otherwise great managers (who took the blame and readily admitted their lack of experience with the (then) new techniques and accommodate planning accordingly - but by then it was rather late in the project...).

Of course, those cases are getting rare, but remember, we're talking about the statement "I think the fundamental principles of software engineering haven't changed a whole lot since [the 80's]".

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