> Developers .. appears blind to the fact that they play only a minor role in the bigger picture.
> Developers are not good at this work.
Developers aren't some special creatures with one dimensional fixed mindset. They can do whatever that needs to be done.
This is kind of silly stereotyping precisely why makes developers hate managers. I hate managers who think of their team as mere code monkeys that are "not good at" some mythical management work.
I am a manager myself but I never diminish role of my team members as "minor players", "not good at work" ect. They are my peers and partners who are equally as "major players" as anyone else.
I love this. The best teams I've been a part of are those that had a mutual respect for everyone else's work. I was an engineer on those teams, and thank god for the product manager, tech lead, design work, ux researchers, etc. Things work so much better when there's a real culture of "we're all in this together, and we all have important roles to play".
"Developers aren't some special creatures with one dimensional fixed mindset. They can do whatever that needs to be done."
Yes, but it is ok to generalize in a broad discussion like this one. Otherwise we can have no meaningful conversation. In general managers do not understand developers. And in general developers do not understand management. Those that are good have been exposed to both sides.
I never diminish anyone but it is naive to think that everyone contributes equally.
I think I've observed enough of this sentiment over the years, from some very smart and successful people, to come to the conclusion that, if it is nonsense, it is non-obvious.
> I never diminish anyone
Perhaps you never _intend_ to diminish anyone, but to some, your statements may reasonably appear to be diminishing some cohort.
I think this is bc one practices abstraction while the other practices persuasion.
I see these two forces as equal and opposite. A yin and yang kind of thing.
It appears that the best orgs have these two things in balance.
My cherry picked list:
Building: honesty, introversion, reason Selling: charisma, extroversion, empathy
but you're also the one who gets the time to see the big picture and hopefully realize that, yes, the development side of a project, while the most fundamental, is also just one of the part. The other being : handling customer expectations, making sure the budget use can be explained, making sure people stay happy even when confronted to "absurd" customer's request, making sure to understand the project ecosystem to make sure you get the right customer contact person in front of your team, making sure the one dev with a broken back gets a proper chair, making sure good project are rewarded, you make sure HR's department craziness don't alienate your devs, you-f*g-name-it (been there, done that, got the tshirt : I've been in dev, business consulting and management :-))
There's an entire world of industries in which software is a 'nice-to-have' enabler of various levels of business logic, not the product itself.
The assumption that development is the fundamental key to all projects is, I'd imagine, the 'delusion' referenced earlier.
But I can admit it's not like that everywhere, sure. But I've yet to see industries where people pay programmers to work on IT project which are not fundamental in a way or another or in the process of becoming fundamental. The point is when programs get deployed, they usually transform (and hopefully improve) a situation. Once the transformation is accomplished, the program becomes fundamental...
Low performance, bare minimum devs, sure need reminding and pro-ding to get anything done... yes, you need managers to babysit.
Companies with heavy management usually have mediocre at best devs and little to no innovation. They have great sales and support - this keeps them alive.
Captain obvious here - there is no one size fits all. Do what makes sense at your org and take home a paycheck or leave and start your own business - there has never been a better time!
The point is two-fold. First, creation and maintenance of a high performance team as the company grows is worth someone focusing on, not just hoping it happens organically (sometimes people, especially new hires, need to know "yes. You are really free to make this decision yourself. I'll back you on it." Likewise, sometimes people doing good work need someone who can spend the time to highlight the value of it to the rest of the business, to effect a promotion). Second, ensuring other needs of the business inform that high performance team, WITHOUT interrupting it, are also worth focusing on.
These are both true regardless of the environment, but become bigger needs the larger the company is.
Managers do this? right, right. I would say managers at best dont mess it up. Creation and maintenance of high performance team comes from within. The surrounding support certainly helps, but to say a manager creates and maintains this is a bit of a stretch.
"ensuring other needs of the business inform that high performance team"
I have found if it needs to be known or communicated it will happen. High performance teams are not just coders (another fail from managers) they are intelligent people who can read and write emails and know how to speak to other humans. This may be the stereotype of some hot pocket eating teenager in a closet from the movies but that is certainly not the case in most professional environments.
For the second, of course they are. You have to take the two statements I made together. There is a spectrum; at one end are devs working on what they feel is important, but not knowing they're not working on what the business feels is important. At the other is the business deciding everything the devs do, oftentimes changing priorities every week. Having one person as a middleman there can be immensely helpful. That may look like a manager saying "Hey Bob. Jane has this need; work with her to understand and implement it", and handling everything off to a dev, but the point is that the manager, A. Gave Jane (and everyone else) one person to reach out to initially when it came to their needs of the team, B. Helped determine that Jane's need was a priority against all the other needs, and C. Gave Bob permission to ignore all other incoming requests and direct them back to the manager, to focus on Jane's need. That is not to say Bob is not reading and writing; it IS to say that Bob can benefit from someone keeping him from being interrupted by every person in the business with a need who thinks he might help.
The challenge I see a lot of managers have is that they look to much at an engineer as a widget and not literal human that is just as capable as the manager (most the time). There are often times no lines between roles and responsibilities and every shop does that slightly different, and not based on some framework they masterly put together, but just something based on how the pieces fell in place with some help from previous experiences.
I just wanted to say also - _most_ engineering managers are not good managers. They were good engineers that are in the unfortunate process of the Peter Principle.
I've yet to meet the kind of superstar dev who is also superstar market and customer oriented.
That can be challenging as a lot of important innovation doesn't come from customer feedback and you need talented people to do those things as well.
I think Spolsky said it best about the dynamic between managers, product and developers
It's also uncharitable to split teams into either high-performance special ops teams vs. mediocre, low skill / low potential teams. Two trends make this distinction meaningless: GROWTH and SCALE. If these don't apply then you can totally let the team self-manage. FANG companies typically have all those rockstars you're looking for and multiple levels of technical management.
Sometimes you can plan for success/heroic actions (in the good way) but often it happens by accident.
The right person digging into a weird problem they encountered, two people sitting together to review a design or someone doing a firmware update that fixes a bug in the RAID controller giving you double the IOps...
I have tons of anecdotes from colleagues who did some unplanned work just because they talked with someone else and that work then turned out to have massive positive impact. The results are lauded but it wasn't even clear when the "little" project started that it would actually be a massive boon.
At a prior job (some website selling hotels online) I was responsible for the project that ended up giving the whole fleet a 25% capacity boost. Instead of 2000 machines we only bought 1500 next quarter. If we calculate that in perpetuity my project was a massive success. Millions of EUR saved since 2011.
The project initially started out as "tons of people tried building a decent perl RPM but couldn't get it to work, could you have a look?". The guy originally tasked with it was busy fixing a broken LDAP server. So I built some RPMs, wrote a bit of tooling around it and we ended up with a Perl environment separate from the system perl which was great because the business was nearly exclusively running on Perl 5.8.9. At that point I looked into using that to get us off CentOS4. With the help of two colleagues we got a CentOS5 environment running and could migrate to a x86_64 environment.
That migration than gave us a 25% capacity boost and happiness ensued all around. The OS upgrade wasn't part of the original project scope, we just went with it because it made sense and management understood that it's a good idea.
I think many developers (not just coders, but in general technical people who make the actual product, designers, engineers, ...) feel there is an unfair primacy of managers / business people over developers / technical people. This is even reflected in the job descriptions: I hate the term "individual contributor" for example, it implies replacability and that non-ICs (managers) contribute more than one person.
Not every company has "bullshit" managers and for sure some developers are delusional. But these bullshit managers exist, and I believe this happens when you put people who are far away from making the product in charge. If the managers and executives are not intimately familiar with the product and the customers, then the product becomes some interchangable thing that you hustle. This can be disastrous for the work climate but also for the success of the company.
If you look at a lot of pretty incredible projects that often were finished ahead of schedule or with groundbreaking capability, they often happen to be led by a deeply technical person. e.g. Hoover Dam, the SR-71, etc.
If you look at CEOs of tech companies, I believe a majority of them have an engineering undergrad degree of some form.
But, yes. Bullshit managers invariably choose to take empowerment onto themselves, despite a lack of knowledge, and oftentimes without any real responsibility, either (i.e., they don't bear the consequences of their decisions).
I even worked at one incredibly toxic organization for a year, before I left, where sales people would literally roam the office, grab a dev, and task them with a customer request.
This company was in a very specialized niche market, and was basically the only player. The only thing I couldn't figure out is why someone else hadn't come along and eaten their lunch, because they were suffering from chronic under-funding. Getting them to commit to migrating to AWS was a major eye opener for them; since they suddenly had to actually pay bills or they'd lose the whole operation.
I do not believe in self organizing teams. I have not seem them work. Without direction the team will fumble until someone assumes control. I have also not seen many happy in such an environment.
The opposite is strict top-down control, such as what is often described and lamented on HN, is equally bad. No one wants to work under a dictator.
There's a balance to be struck between authority and autonomy.
Large scale software development without management is proven to be possible by the existence of functioning FLOSS projects like the Linux kernel, various GNU tools, KDE and plenty of other examples.
I have not heard of a single software development company with 0 software developers. Not even Oracle manages that.
Managers are necessary for the parts of the company other than development. You can have a FLOSS project developed organically, and separately a company in the business of support, services, etc. Managers are also necessary in order for the company to exercise control over the development and extract value. And this may be needed for a company to survive. But they are not needed for software development itself.
I'm reading: "You need a manager to coordinate a deeply hierarchical and separated structure with production at the bottom and the clients at the outside."
I mean no disrespect, but from my perspective I see a deeper problem here that is being patched over by exceptional people like yourself. Shouldn't the creators and clients have a major, high impact role and the coordinators a supporting role in terms of decision making?
To make an exaggerated joke it looks a bit like a dictator complaining about all their responsibilities and the hard decisions they have to make. Well maybe they shouldn't even be in that position to begin with.
And yes I've seen the diagrams and the theory behind this. But I've become more and more suspicious of bureaucracy and process that tries to fight the symptoms of lack of trust and human connection.
This resonates but what I have seen is when you engage a company that has this model you have to emulate their model to fit within their needs, then you get infected with it.
"Shouldn't the creators and clients have a major, high impact role and the coordinators a supporting role in terms of decision making?"
No. The creators usually answer "how to do it". The more important question is "what to do". Both groups are important but doing the right thing is more important than how you do it.
Its also a grass is geener issue. Work is generally more enjoyable as an IC, you get to focus and write code. Until you end up having to build something really stupid, and you want more control over product direction. Then you end up as manager, and long for the simplicity of being able to focus and write code. At least that's how I've felt at times.
If you hold the same number of meetings but stop inviting some stakeholders, those stakeholders are going to be upset. If instead you remove some meetings from the process entirely, by e.g. not requiring multiple design reviews for internal products, or by not letting platform teams force everyone else to use their software, or by letting teams spin up their own low capacity services without meeting with ops, or anything else that lowers the complexity of getting work done, then your team will be happy and the previous gatekeepers will be complaining.
I genuinely think that many engineering managers see their most important skill as "getting engineers to do things for reasons they don't understand".
This issue is not limited to developers.
> Developers on the other hand appears blind to the fact that they play only a minor role in the bigger picture.
Y Combinator was largely founded as a rejection of this premise. Paul Graham believed it was much easier to teach great Software Hackers how to business, than it was to teach business folks how to software. I think it turned out pretty well.
> A scenario which never happens because in real life you have at least 3 levels of technical management, multiple divisions/departments involved, spread across continents and multiple vendors participating.
And your organization with 3 levels of technical management and all those divisions and departments will often get their lunch eaten by a very small group of people working in a startup, moving faster and accomplishing more in less time.
I agree
"And your organization with 3 levels of technical management and all those divisions and departments will often get their lunch eaten by a very small group of people working in a startup, moving faster and accomplishing more in less time."
You misunderstand. It is not my org - it is the client orgs. And none of those are software companies. The speed with which you can move is irrelevant because you are constrained by the pace of the org you're working for.
kbmunchkin wrote:
> The lead developer handled communication with the IT Director about project status
The fact that the ultimate person being reported to was the head of IT strongly implies to me that it was an in-house development team working on in-house projects.
Your list,
> orchestrating people across sales, strategy, business transformation, creative, development, QA, operations and infrastructure.
Strongly implies that your experience comes from building consumer products.
Personally, I've spent time working on both successful and unsuccessful projects on both sides of the fence. What I've seen is that the most straightforward way to create a dysfunctional team is to try to take what works from one context, and apply it uncritically to the other. I personally hate working with a dedicated product manager on an in-house project every bit as much as I hate working without a dedicated product manager on consumer-facing stuff.
To make a general statement saying managers are not needed is as silly as saying all developers are delusional
No one ever said this though, I'm not sure what the point of bringing it up is.
I think it's that developers fail to grasp that they are in the enterprise world. Web development and SaaS has blurred the lines, but at its core it's the same: the product you work on is a tool for another business. It's a bit more sexy because it's not mainframes, cubicles and suites anymore, but in the end the job is the same. And in that setting, the role of a developer is indeed minor in the bigger picture. There are exceptions in R&D, cutting edge projects, or in an early stage startup, but for the vast majority of developers the above is true.
I've found that if you throw a bunch of Alpha Geeks together without constraints you may as well be herding cats. They'll want to work on their individual wishlists of strategic research problems (throw in this new tool! new methodologies I saw at this conference!) with less concern for the unromantic tactics, socialization, and alignment that makes a project succeed.
It can be reluctance to understand why you're doing what you're doing. It can also be because no one cares to explain it to you. Most of the time it's probably between those two extremes.
And yes some times it's bloat. But rarely all of it. I don't have a solution to this.
(And before you write a knee-jerk response, double-check your reasoning. Without managers, developers produced the Free Software ecosystem. Without developers, what did managers produce?)
I tend to believe these arguments just curve right into confirmation bias.
I’ve been on teams that worked fine with managers and those that did not. It depends on the commitment of the actors in question.
Anything else is reading what we want to in the tea leaves.
Edit: Been working on distributed systems since the late 90s, from public uni to big corp, to day 1 startups. It’s just computer configuration. Not magic.
I've stopped being skeptical of the general concept of management. I'm no fan of LinkedIn, but Reed Hoffman said something in a talk that instantly changed my entire opinion about the idea of a developer moving up in the hierarchy and no longer writing code. Paraphrased from memory: "You're still programming; just at a higher level of abstraction."
As a 'developer' I thought 'we were doing all the stuff' while everyone else catered to us.
During my roles out of that seat, I view 90% of development as a form of intellectual labour, it's just work, one piece of many things.
The hardest job by far is selling.
The next hardest job overall, as the commenter mentions, is making a 'whole product' and targeting it at customers.
Engineering is hard, but not harder than the above.
I would almost like every Engineer to work for 3 months in PM or Sales just to get their perspective flipped.
Engineering feels more 'worky' because it's more direct.
Basically it seems the average manager in buisness would be a bad fit to manage developers. overall a manager is still needed for sure. I guess its the same everywhere though a bad manager vs a good manager makes a world of difference.
We all forget, at least in a for profit company, that we are all employed by selling things. Like it or not without the good salespeople, some of us don't have jobs.
I understood GP's point as more directed towards "pure Eng. manager" type positions, often when there's also already a PM present. And I've witnessed first hand how his criticism rings true in that case.
A) Get rid of developers B) Get rid of dev managers
Let me know :)
Your run of the mile non-technical manager sure is not very good at understanding the intricate complexity of all the moving parts of creating software.
Developers on the other hand appears blind to the fact that they play only a minor role in the bigger picture. While technology is difficult it pales in comparison to orchestrating people across sales, strategy, business transformation, creative, development, QA, operations and infrastructure.
That's just the horizontal alignment. In a single entity. In a single timezone. With a single vendor. A scenario which never happens because in real life you have at least 3 levels of technical management, multiple divisions/departments involved, spread across continents and multiple vendors participating.
You need competent people to align, coordinate, communicate and pick up the stuff which falls through the cracks. Developers are not good at this work.
You need a manager. And of course they must be competent.
EDIT: I don't actually think developers are delusional. I worded the phrase to mirror the absolutism of the statement "I've come to the conclusion that software managers are not needed" which is just plain silly.