

Fear of Ignorance - jasonshen
http://randfishkin.com/blog/153/fear-of-ignorance

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wpietri
I think the fear/hatred he describes among techies for non-technical managers
is overall pretty reasonable.

A lot of managers believe their job is to make decisions, and a lot of
employees even encourage that. But technology decisions often have subtle,
far-reaching implications. So when managers make decisions they shouldn't
(e.g., picking a toolset, or outsourcing a project, or simultaneously fixing
resources, scope and schedule), they end up thoroughly screwing the developers
involved. But if none of the other managers understand the tech either, then
managers can happily blame the devs. Hands up everybody who has seen that?

Software is almost unique, in that it's a collective intellectual work that is
expected to function and grow and change over many years. The only close
equivalent I can think of is legal code, but I think software is worse in that
legal code is made to be interpreted by humans.

The only non-technical managers I've had that I didn't at least briefly
consider murdering were the ones who, like Rand Fishkin, were comfortable
admitting ignorance. That let them leave technical decisions to the techies.

~~~
spamizbad
>(e.g., picking a toolset, or outsourcing a project, or simultaneously fixing
resources, scope and schedule)

My company had non-developers make these decisions and we paid the price. We
were an org of PHP and Python developers "forced" to switch to C#/.NET (At the
request of two technical-ish, but non-developer VPs) It really sucked because
the teams expert knowledge got wiped to zero and we had to spend several
months learning new tools while also keeping our original deadlines. At the
time, I jumped at the opportunity to explore something new. Ultimately
however, it was bad business and continues to cost the company money as
nothing we were doing received any direct or indirect benefit from being done
in .NET. The only difference was we worked slower and produced more defects.

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marquis
I'm constantly telling a good friend of mine who is a co-founder of a start-up
NOT to learn to code. He's absolutely brilliant in his field (a technical but
non-CS field) and while he wishes he could code up his ideas I've directed him
to developing flowcharts and spending time writing - his ability to think up
new ways of doing things within his field is unparalleled. Personally I think
he's a genius at what he does and I see that when he tried to code he stops
focusing on what he does best. Even though he understand enough core computing
concepts to design applications I think he's jealous of my ability to mock up
a demo app, while maybe I'm just clever enough to not go down the rabbit hole
of trying to learn everything about everything..

~~~
da02
His burning curiosity may help explain his genius.

What's the name of the startup? It sounds very cool.

~~~
marquis
Stealth mode right now, it's a niche market but lots of fun.

~~~
da02
Congrats! Sometimes it sounds like having fun is half the battle. (Pardon the
war metaphor.)

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dkural
I suspect that the main reason for attitudes towards non-technical people is
due to a wide distrust of "business type" guys. I think coders often have a
great amount of respect for product designers, UI/UX folks making wireframes,
.. or anyone who shows some capacity to actually make something, for deep
thought & creativity, or to articulate a convincing & unique vision.

The greater myth is that "technical" people must lack "soft" skills. If you go
beyond anecdotes, software engineers on the whole are more likely to be
married & enjoy happy marriages, less likely to get divorced, have long
lasting friendships, communicate honestly & care about others, are more likely
to be engaged in politics and charities, etc. etc.

Likewise, engineering & building large software systems together (or any
machine of complexity...), requires a great degree of communication &
cooperation, thus it is no surprise that software engineers on the whole are
actually pretty engaging people & have good communication skills.

~~~
zheng
Not that I think you're wrong, but do you have a citation for your second
paragraph?

~~~
andrewflnr
Also, is that compared to other professional fields, or the general
population? The latter wouldn't be very remarkable.

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Umofomia
I think the main crux of the article is ultimately dependent on the one thing
he mentions at the very end:

    
    
      It goes (almost) without saying that the only reason I can
      afford to be non-technical is because I’m surrounded by a
      bunch of geniuses.
    

His points are valid, but if you're a single non-technical founder, it can
often be hard to even know whom to surround yourself with if you lack the
ability to evaluate them in the first place. This point is not made very
apparent in the article.

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jvandenbroeck
Yes, non technical people can lead technical people successful - but I think
they are the exceptions on the rule.

As the leader you are responsible for the results of the project - and if you
don't understand the technology, you don't understand the risks of the
technology. If you don't have an A+ team, they might be doing the wrong things
and you wouldn't know. I'm talking about bad architecture, bad technology
choices, full dependence on one developer,..

~~~
pbourke
There is another side to the story - the worst managers I have had throughout
my career have all been former programmers. Leadership and managerial skills
plus an analytical orientation trump a coding background or specific
technology skills to me.

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technoir
The article makes a great point, it's not necessary to be technical to be
successful in technology management. Also you should be proud of your
strengths and the contributions they enable you to make rather than focus on
power psychology.

I would also agree with the author that a technical background helps.

It seems to me that without a technical background it's possible to make an
incorrect appraisal about problems with tecnical projects.

For example, the product is incorrect or late. Why?

As a manager you need to determine a belief on why things are problematic and
how they can be improved.

There are a lot of possible problems. If a non-technical person gets this
incorrect it can have very negative consequences. It's a minefield that is
typically, though not always, better traversed by people with technical
skills.

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dasil003
Strong article. I think fear of technical ignorance is scar tissue. It's an
overcompensation of the fact that traditionally programmers were undervalued
until silicon valley proved that software does matter and is in fact a place
where talent and decision-making power are incredibly important.

But in the end, technical knowledge is just one pillar. You also need
strategy, management and ops to build a successful company. Rarely can one
person bring all these to the table, instead you put together the right team
of founders and employees to cover the essential skills. As long as you have a
strong tech team whose knowledge and wisdom is feeding into the core of your
decision making process then I think a CEO with more hard business experience
is probably an advantage. It depends a lot on the company though.

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zeteo
Well, come on. The basics are not that difficult. If you just attended the
first 1-2 lectures of a CS 101 class, you wouldn't be talking about "the
ability to call variables via programmatic statements". Plus, I'm sure any of
your developers would be happy to spend a couple of hours and get you up to
speed on the difference between variables and function calls.

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gfodor
Technical skills as a founder aren't important because you can build the
product youself, but because they enable you find the best people who can.

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johnx123-up
Another "morons are good managers" kind of article...

As far as I heard, this attitude is currently killing Google. Google has lots
of MBAs to manage hackers and it really hurts Google.

~~~
danshapiro
I don't think you have either: a) read the article, or b) the first clue of
what's going on inside Google.

Rand is not a moron, nor is he advocating management by morons. He's not an
MBA either; he's a self-taught college dropout. He's saying that company
founders who are nontechnical should be humble but not ashamed.

Google may have faults, but hiring MBAs to manage engineers is certainly not
one of them. The engineering management hierarchy is almost exclusively
extremely technical.

~~~
johnx123-up
Everybody I know there in Google confirms that MBAs are really crippling it.
Recently I had a lengthy discussion with couple of them on that. They do have
politics and chaos.

Self-taught and nontechnical are two different terms. In real world scenario,
self-taught people often associate themselves with "technical".

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earl
Rand appears to be, or at least to have become, a domain expert in SEO. I
think devs, at least those not working on the latest social mobile local photo
coupon sharing, tend to be respectful of domain experts. I think non-technical
people seems to often be used to mean people without technical expertise _or_
deep domain knowledge.

~~~
itmag
That's right. I respect ALL competence.

What I don't like is to be bossed around by puffy people with ZERO self-
insight and INFINITE delusion.

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freemarketteddy
At the end of the day I have no respect for a person who cannot take the time
to learn CS Basics...If a technical guy can read Steve Blank,Clayton
Christensen,Hayek and Friedman....a non-techie can definitely read The Art of
Computer Programming if he intends to run a software business.....coming up
with nonsensical excuses will not help!..Here are some common excuses.

1) I need to have a degree in Engineering

Well not really...Myself and all the best programmers I have known have learnt
very little from educational institutions than they have from man pages.

2) Little Knowledge can be dangerous

Yes...it can be but noone is asking you to be en expert....by learning the
basics you will only begin to understand the complexity of the problems being
solved and will learn when to open your mouth and when not to...saying things
like "lets move to the cloud" or "lets do this in an agile manner" without
having a clue only makes you look bad!

3) It is not my cup of tea.

Noone is asking you to become Linus Torvalds...at least try to know as much as
some kid in high school would...If you dont have the thirst for knowledge to
begin with,you are in the wrong business!

~~~
psykotic
> If a technical guy can read Steve Blank,Clayton Christensen,Hayek and
> Friedman....a non-techie can definitely read The Art of Computer Programming

What utter nonsense. The theoretical difficulty of pop-economics books like
Hayek's Economics In One Lesson or The Road to Serfdom is less than Teach
Yourself Programming In 24 Hours. That's not meant as a slight on any of those
books or their authors, but your comparison is so inapt it beggars belief. The
mathematical prerequisites alone for reading TAOCP are so significant that
Knuth had to write an advanced undergraduate and graduate-level textbook
(Concrete Mathematics) to equip students with even a small subset of the tools
required.

~~~
longlivedeath
> Hayek's Economics In One Lesson

s/Hayek/Hazlitt/

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danbmil99
Nice try, Hermain Cain.

