My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

http://thecodist.com/article/how-many-people-does-it-take-to...

"The more people you have in any project the more communications you need, the more management you need, the slower information is disbursed and problems reported. You have to have more process to ensure that anything will be accomplished. Of course this all costs more money and time and often you have to do less just to get something shipped. It’s easy for everyone responsible for all these people to worry about unknown problems biting them in the ass so every decision becomes very conservative and cautious.This of course makes shipping difficult, expensive and often drags things out for a long time. Add to that memories of previous projects that had the same issues and things get even more cautious and slow."

The main function of management at any medium or large company is to manage people, keep the peace and keep things chugging along. This person makes the huge mistake of wanting to be manager ... to do something other than manage people. Wanting to be a manager to use "the power" for good (ha!, having done both let me tell you this: managers have less power than individual contributors. Yes you have "power" to choose, what you say goes to an extent, but only insofar that you keep making "the right" choices. Think of a manager as a 14 year old going to a party and getting told by his parents that he "has the choice" to do drugs. I assume there are levels of management that have more freedom, but middle management does not provide anyone with the power to change things. Forget about that. It can provide you with an easy job, maybe even with significantly more money (after X years), but that's it).

It doesn't even matter what the other thing is he wants to accomplish. This way of thinking will destroy any large company team. Working at large companies, you constantly see this truth reinforced: there are people who can manage "large" projects by themselves, and take ownership. They just make sure that a certain function is available and works. They usually produce software to help them with this, but while it covers 99%, it doesn't cover 100%. I work at a well-known company that people idolize here and yet I can name 5 times that an individual that in some cases was a bad programmer in terms of code style or even understanding of syntax outperformed teams of a dozen software engineers due to the fact that the individual's understanding of the problem far exceeded the programmers/developers/TLs/... understanding of the problem. Here, like everywhere else, they get punished for that. The users of that software revere them, but everyone else (especially the team that was supposed to fulfill the function they took upon themselves) well ... "does not see them as a team player", and absurd rationalizations are made (what if the "owner" gets hit by a bus ? does not satisfy bus-factor. Reality: large teams that build software, then "move on" and abandon it or go unresponsive pretty much fail the bus factor without involvement of any accident at all), but one of the main "real" concerns is that people are afraid of the power this individual gets because of this ownership (even though they're rarely aware of it, and if they are they use it for things like code style, almost never for amassing power in the company like any of those managers would do).

And any manager is always going to do the same : they're going with the choice that keeps the team together. The choice that doesn't rock the boat. They would have chosen against the author of this article at 10 different junctions, because he is divisive, direct, and worst of all : probably he is right and unwilling to compromise except for good, technical reasons.