

Coding is priority number five - tghw
http://bitquabit.com/post/coding-is-priority-number-five/

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jbert
> "Shit Umbrella"

I have in the past categorised managers as "umbrellas" or "funnels" (and I
guess there's an inbetween 'pipe').

The idea is that there is work the team should ideally not be doing (the
'shit'). That either needs to be rebuffed by the manager or handled another
way (e.g. by stalling on it, doing it themselves, or making it someone else's
problem).

Good managers keep the shit away from the team somehow. They're umbrellas.

Poor managers act as simple proxies. If anyone requests anything from them,
they pass it on to someone on their team, without considering if they should
or could block it (or handle it themselves). They're pipes.

Really bad managers act as intensifiers of the shit. e.g. by getting multiple
people on the team duplicating effort on it. Or by being the sort of corporate
busybody who goes and attracts more of it. Or by having slow, talky meetings
about it which add time and friction. They're funnels.

~~~
duwease
One thing I found from my experience as a team lead (and which is somewhat
touched on in this article), is that sometimes, because team members never get
a whiff of all of the deflected things that never reached them, the more
critical will sometimes get the opinion that you're doing nothing at all other
than acting as a pipe.

I vividly recall one incident where I passed along an urgent UAT issue to a
self-styled "hot shot" developer, who responded (with cc's) that he was
entirely too busy, and that "if I had two hands I could do it myself".. since
I was "obviously not busy as I hadn't had many commits lately". Meanwhile, I
was two hours into a client call negotiating turning functionality requests
into deadline shifts, was simultaneously trying to triage a production issue
to see if it was our problem or the client's problem, and had 50+ emails from
developers and clients just from that day still un-responded to.. yeah, silent
evidence is a bitch.

I do have to agree, however, that moving back to development released a lot of
stress for me. It's far less stressful thinking about whether or not I can get
something done as opposed to wondering whether 15 other people are going to be
able to get something done..

~~~
jbert
Yes, and I didn't mean to be rude to any team leads, sorry if it came across
that way.

In any role, it's important to communicate the work you're doing (ideally
without bragging), up and down the hierarchy. That is hard for an umbrella to
do but possible. ("Just checking folks - is anyone keen to fill in 5-min
increment timesheets?" (Groans) "Thought not")

Also, changes in manager offer a natural opportunity to compare, since you can
detect a difference in the kind of work the team receives.

~~~
duwease
Sorry, the muse for my post was to vent tangential memories that it recalled
moreso than anything you said that seemed particularly rude or short-sighted
:)

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cek
"Your job, should you accept it, is to become what I’ve lovingly dubbed Shit
Umbrella"

So, so true. And this is an excellent article.

There's another aspect of becoming a manager that the Benjamin doesn't discuss
here, but is closely related:

The best managers/leads are excellent at saying "No". They say "No" to outside
(especially upward) voices as well as to the people they lead. The most
important aspect of being excellent at saying "No" (as a leader) is to be able
to say "No" to yourself.

I don't know Benjamin myself, but he sounds smart and probably has tons of
great ideas. The team is executing against a plan and Benjamin might have a
really great idea for a new feature, process, etc... To be a really great Shit
Umbrella a lead like Benjamin needs to be disciplined about when to say "No"
to his own ideas.

~~~
j_baker
I suspect you and I agree on this, but I'd like to reframe your argument a
bit. I would argue that a good manager should strive to _never_ explicitly say
"no". There are plenty of ways to limit misguided ideas without explicitly
saying no. For instance, you can say "Yes but...", "Perhaps, but only if...",
or (my personal favorite) "Good idea, but I personally like your other idea
much better". The advantage this approach has is that it makes sure that
you're not shutting down a good idea that has some major (albeit fixable)
flaws.

Of course, sometimes you have to just set your foot down and just say "No".
But I've noticed that as managers get more experienced, they tend to rely on
their ability to do so less and less.

~~~
cek
I put "no" in parenthesis specifically for this reason.

Someone gave my wife and I advice early on to avoid explicitly saying no to
our children when they were very little. It was very, very good advice.

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poundy
I used to be a developer. I now work as a team lead / client liaison. Coding
is not in the top 5. My job is to anticipate what my team will need and make
sure that there are no obstacles. I also help with DB design and platform
choices. Strong knowledge and experience with what developers need help me a
lot.

I was wondering if a person without a development background could take my
role as team leader to manage 3/4 developers on a daily basis.

~~~
rollypolly
I think it's fairly common to see people in managerial positions without
technical backgrounds. I've rarely seen it work tho.

~~~
ryansloan
Agreed. It happens a lot (in all my previous jobs I had mostly non-technical
people as leads), but they have to work 10x harder to be effective. I think
that even a limited technical background does a lot of things for you:

1) You can scope your team's features and commitments more effectively if you
have some understanding of the technical complexity of each ask.

2) Understanding the technology (and the skills of your people) means you have
better intuition about the right people to bring into the room when a problem
arises

3) It's easier to be empathetic with your team when you have engineering
experience, because you know that many times the spec is just the tip of the
iceberg.

4) Credibility. A group of devs will have a lot more respect for you from the
start if they know you're not just a bureaucrat and you can code (even if it's
not as well as they can)

~~~
webjprgm
At a previous company I had a project manager who's technical background was
putting up Wordpress sites. He tried really hard, but he still made mistakes
in #1-3. The company's COO, however (small company, so he was just one level
above my manager), used to be a coder several years ago. So he understood time
commitments and could sensibly discuss software design. I think that's what
really kept the development team running, because it's sure what kept me
running (deflecting "shit" and making sensible management decisions). At the
very least I had a lot more respect for him, just like you say in #4.

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mdwrigh2
That sounds like a pretty awesome way to handle it, so props to Fog Creek.

Having said that, what happened after he stepped down? Did they hire outside
of the company? Promote another senior developer?

~~~
gecko
We promoted an awesome developer who really wanted to be the Kiln Team Lead
into the position.

~~~
alexgartrell
who?

~~~
kevingessner
me!

~~~
kamens
Congrats, Kevin -- this sounds like a great move.

~~~
georgemcbay
At the very least, he now gets to put "Shit Umbrella" on his business cards.

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levifig
Holy crap, I couldn't agree more. Thank you Benjamin!

I just wrote a comment/follow-up from the flip-side perspective: someone wired
to be a "Shit Umbrella" who is stuck in a world where you have to be a
"rockstar coder" first – <http://levifig.com/articles/a-tale-of-priorities/>

~~~
rwallace
I remember reading about Microsoft having a Program Manager job title, which
sounded exactly like what you're looking for. Might be worth approaching them,
or looking to see whether other companies have something similar?

~~~
levifig
Thanks for the tip! Currently, I'm working on a startup I co-founded so I got
my plate full. I wrote that article knowing that there are more people like me
and because I just now found myself in a position to do what I love but spent
some 10 years looking for it… :(

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mosjeff
Wow, this article couldn't have come at a better time for me. Recently, I
jumped from being a lead developer to being an architect and manager. Benjamin
articulates exactly what I'm going through. Unfortunately, I don't think going
_backwards_ is an option for me.

~~~
gecko
I actually did enjoy being a team lead for awhile (once I got the hang of it).
If you're a people person, it can be tremendously rewarding to see your team
thrive at delivering piles of awesome. I just reached a point where I wasn't
learning anything anymore (Fog Creek's just not that big; you do pretty much
run out of novel managey things after awhile) and wanted to do more coding
again. So I guess I'd tell you to grasp on really tightly to the idea of
hanging your success on your team's success, and knowing that if they're doing
their job well, you're probably doing the right thing.

~~~
mosjeff
Great advice. Similar to you, the main vexation has been "what comes next".
Being a developer, you can scale your knowledge vertically and horizontally,
constantly improving yourself and growing. Being a "shit umbrella", though,
doesn't seem to lend itself to such growth opportunities.

~~~
cek
I wrote a post the other day about how to think about career
trajectory/growth. In my experience people generally think about it wrong.

TL;DR: Don't think about your career as a ballistic trajectory, but more as a
series of interplanetary missions.

[http://ceklog.kindel.com/2012/04/08/you-are-thinking-of-
your...](http://ceklog.kindel.com/2012/04/08/you-are-thinking-of-your-career-
trajectory-wrong/)

~~~
mosjeff
Thanks for sharing. I really like your perspective (not to mention the
analogy). Would you agree, though, that part of the problem is with company's
views on their own employee's trajectories?

~~~
cek
I was fortunate enough to work at one company for 21 years (MS) that supported
this model. I suspect, given my personality, passions, and style, if MS had
not supported me in this way I would have just done it across many companies.

So, at my core, I believe it is up to the employee. If you are stuck, GET OUT.

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benohear
So what were priorities #1-4?

~~~
gecko
(Not in order) PR, ensuring infrastructure was in place, working with
sales/support on priorities, product direction.

