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Aside: Yet another useful and thought provoking question and set of answers on SE shut down "because it's not a good fit for the format".
It was closed after 2 pages of answers and hundreds of votes - not so problematic IMHO.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree but both SE and Wikipedia suffer from moderators being picked based on karma. Karma is achievable easily despite any motives and personality traits which are bad. They should be picked by humans as they are a better and more objective judge of who is fit to moderating a site to the site's standards.
AFAIK, SE mods are not picked based on karma, you can nominate yourself to be mod, and users will vote according to many indicators, not karma only. Elections: http://stackoverflow.com/election
The top rated comment on this question asserts that the reason why programmers have lower salaries is because they are logical, intelligent individuals who refuse to play the politics game and thus are hated by executives. Not only it this incorrect (have you seen the politics in certain open source software projects ?) but it plays into a narrative that programmers want to believe: business people are corrupt and pr…
Yet he's in a "cost-center" and I'm in a revenue-center when, basically, without his work my code would be as useful as European politicians right now. This is insane but that's the sign of organizations that have hierarchies misaligned with what generates value for them. Basically, such organizations haven't figured out how to assign such "hidden" value a number while in my case it's simple to judge the value generated. (Actually, sometimes the ones in power are too afraid to admit they'd be useless without these guys).
Think about it, a programmer can very well exist without BAs/PMS etc but BAs/PMs can't exist without programmers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree but both SE and Wikipedia suffer from moderators being picked based on karma. Karma is achievable easily despite any motives and personality traits which are bad. They should be picked by humans as they are a better and more objective judge of who is fit to moderating a site to the site's standards.
AFAIK, SE mods are not picked based on karma, you can nominate yourself to be mod, and users will vote according to many indicators, not karma only. Elections: http://stackoverflow.com/election
Full moderators are elected... but high-rep users take on a ton of moderation tasks.
I view the PM role akin the role a sweeper plays in curling. A good PM will clear the path for others on the team to do what they do best. Sometimes that's wrangling with devops so the developers can keep programming, or it's calling a meeting with stakeholders to brief them on potential issues before they get out of control. A good PM is offensive, not reactive and thats why a lot of times it seems like they're just…
Just a tip, if you want to keep with your sports metaphors, and meant to say "a good PM is on the offensive", you probably meant "a good PM is proactive (acts to solve a problem before it shows up)". Describing someone as 'offensive' is saying there is something about them that offends you.
It's arguable whether or not a PM should be that aggressive, but I'd say his expression made sense.
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I crossed over from Project Management into Engineering, and my experience was that as a PM my job was to be bothered from Sunup til Sundown and periodically in between. I was expected to know everything about anything that I was asked about, and I was responsible for a large number of people's output without having any authority over them. It was horrible. I think the issue with the SO question is simply the view th…
What you describe is a dysfunctional organization, not a justification for PMs.
The top rated comment on this question asserts that the reason why programmers have lower salaries is because they are logical, intelligent individuals who refuse to play the politics game and thus are hated by executives. Not only it this incorrect (have you seen the politics in certain open source software projects ?) but it plays into a narrative that programmers want to believe: business people are corrupt and pr…
I totally agree with this. I am a quant working at a bank writing trading strategies in C++. I have a colleague in "Infrastructure" (they call it) who sits two desks away from me and he writes C++ code that loads my code and runs it on a massive grid, does load balancing, interfacing and all kinds of cool stuff. Yet he's in a "cost-center" and I'm in a revenue-center when, basically, without his work my code would be…
That's exactly the same kind of self-bullshitting your parent comment was arguing against. NONE of the parts of a business can really work effectively without the others. A bunch of super-smart skilled programmers with attitudes, no leaders and no clear requirements is going to produce a lot of efficient, scalable, well-designed code that represents a handful of sub-projects that can't be integrated and don't do anything useful to end users.
Give me a business analyst who knows his marketplace inside and out. Who can break down the value proposition our business offers to 25 different demographics the same way John Madden breaks down a cover-two defense. Who can see where the market is going before the market knows its going there, and gets the team ready and motivated to get us there before any of our competition even realizes they're behind.
Give me a project manager who can see fires before they start; who can guide 30 people to do the work of 300 and can keep 300 people working efficiently toward the same goal. I want a project manager who craves efficiency in their process like an addict craves meth. Give me a project manager who obssessively clicks the refresh page on O'Reilly's website waiting for updates on books about continuous integration, issue tracking, and version control practices.
And give me a programmer who knows the entire stack like the back of their hand. Who can program Ruby, Python, Java, Haskell, Clojure, Objective-C, C++, C#, Go, Scala, and every kind of Javascript. Who understands what the different hardware constraints on a desktop application and a web application. Give me a programmer who writes elegant unit tests for all of his code, and evey algorithm is the minimum O. Give me a programmer who happily mentors every other developer in our shop and, like Michael Jordan, makes everyone else better.
Give me these three, and I'll change the world, and I'll pay each of them far more than my competition.