in reply to OT: Tech Managers vs. Non-tech Managers..

For balance, I'll take a contrarian view: Some of the more problematic software managers I've worked with or under had been considered excellent developers.

How can being a crack developer hinder you when you're promoted to manager? There are several ways:

Thinking that it's all a technical problem. As individual contributers, we're primarily rewarded for our expertise in solving technical problems. Projects, however, are a mix of technical problems (most of which should be delegated), time and resource management problems, and political problems. If a manager keeps expecting to be rewarded solely for solving the technical problems, they're not going to be effective.

Tunnel Vision. We see things through the filter of our experience. A manager who was successful as a developer using a particular bag of tricks can expect that same bag of tricks to work for a new group under new circumstances, and can block the examination or adoption of new tools or techniques. "Why, back in my day we all made flowcharts and were happy with them. Quit all this talk about UML and get back to work."

Failure to account for individual differences. Developers sometimes have trouble imagining what it's like to live inside someone else's head, and thus have trouble imagining how other people's approaches to problems can be so... wrong different. This can be a hindrance for an individual contributer, but can be a disaster for managers. If you can't understand and work the different viewpoints that members of your team bring to the table, you're liable to commit any one of a number of grevous management sins.

Failure to estimate. A manager who can't get outside of their head, to distance themselves from their past development experiences, risks the sin of estimating on the group's behalf based on how they would do it. This gets compounded when a freshly minted manager is working with a larger team, and doesn't yet fully understand how the added communication overhead is non-linear. "Well, if there were six of me we could do this in six months."

  • Comment on (dws)Re: OT: Tech Managers vs. Non-tech Managers..

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Re: (dws)Re: OT: Tech Managers vs. Non-tech Managers..
by arhuman (Vicar) on Apr 08, 2001 at 00:54 UTC
    You're right I would just add :

    Inability to delegate. A bad technical leader think that as he can do it better, he should do it.
    This prevent him from doing his jobs (make his TEAM produce better) beccause he will have less time to transmit his knowledge, plan/coordonates things...
    The worst effect to this behaviour is to my mind that the coders feel under-estimated (and in a sense it's the case) and this tend to act on their mood and so on their productivity...

    NOTE : I just like to precise what I said earlier, I don't think that technical manager are better, I say that I met more tech-manager in the good managers group than non-tech ones.
    Of course a good tech guy won't automatically make a good manager, but I still do believe that it will be even harder for a non tech one, and I guess that you all know why (haven't you deal with commercial manager ? Financial one ? ;-)

    "Only Bad Coders Badly Code In Perl" (OBC2IP)