Kind advice to everyone willing to share their write ups: avoid Medium.
I can’t read the article because of the signup wall. It is cheap and easy to set up a blog on your own custom domain.
All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people (2019)
31–40 of 91 posts
Re: All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people (2019)
#32Do 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?
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.
Re: All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people (2019)
#33A couple of my favourites include:
"There's no such thing as a stupid question." "Design things for the person who's going to maintain it. It may be you."
Re: All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people (2019)
#34Kind advice to everyone willing to share their write ups: avoid Medium. I can’t read the article because of the signup wall. It is cheap and easy to set up a blog on your own custom domain.
> It is cheap and easy to set up a blog on your own custom domain
True. But you can defeat all of Medium's annoying features by just disabling JavaScript.
Re: All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people (2019)
#35Kind advice to everyone willing to share their write ups: avoid Medium. I can’t read the article because of the signup wall. It is cheap and easy to set up a blog on your own custom domain.
I think it’s a choice to monetize your writings. Medium doesn’t force you to put your stuff behind a paywall. We need to stop blaming Medium and realize the authors wanted to monetize.
Re: All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people (2019)
#36Do 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?
It depends on their leadership style. Micromanagers needs tech backgrounds. Hands-off delegators need communication of goals, and to trust their team.
Re: All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people (2019)
#37Re: All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people (2019)
#38Do 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?
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 a…
A good manager doesn’t need to be technical as they are a managing people. That is the hard part. Not tech.
Re: All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people (2019)
#39Kind advice to everyone willing to share their write ups: avoid Medium. I can’t read the article because of the signup wall. It is cheap and easy to set up a blog on your own custom domain.
In situations like these, Bypass Paywalls extension for Firefox comes really handy! Especially in combination with uMatrix and uBlock Origin.
Re: All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people (2019)
#40Do 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?
I was on a team where the lead had issues like that Ran into a lot of situations like this: https://xkcd.com/1425/ 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…
I think the problem here is often down to non-technical users defining the solution, rather than the problem (or aim).