
A Wake-Up Call for Tech Managers: Listen to Your Programmers - CodeSheikh
https://medium.com/coaching-notes/a-wake-up-call-for-tech-managers-d0415775efd0
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commandlinefan
My oldest is 15 now, and is starting to give serious thought to his future
career. He's considering following in his father's footsteps and focusing on
computer science, and I'm steering him away from it. Why? After all, it pays
well, and there are lots of job openings - if you have a CS degree (and are
under about 45), you'll definitely be able to find good-paying work. But on
the other hand - the absolute best you can possibly hope for is to be a
nameless, faceless, arbitrary replaceable cog with four feet of deskspace in a
noisy, repurposed, open airplane hangar who joins a daily standup each morning
and recites a list of the JIRA ticket numbers you worked on and defending why
it's taken more than a day or two to close any one of them. And then when you
hit 45 and you're too old to code, you not only won't be able to find a soul-
sucking buy high-paying close-jira-tickets-as-fast-as-possible "programmer"
job but you won't be able to move into management either, because that's for
people who went to business school... whose main skill is telling programmers
that they have to close their JIRA tickets faster.

~~~
GhostVII
What's the best alternative? Personally, I can't think of a job that I would
enjoy more than software development, even with the downsides that come with a
lot of the big tech companies. And obviously the benefits are better than
pretty much any other industry. If your biggest concern in your job is an open
office, and dealing with things like stand-ups, you are in a pretty great
position compared to pretty much everyone else in the world. Whenever I talk
to my friends doing work in the trades, or truck driving or something I am
incredibly glad that I chose to go into software.

~~~
existencebox
I'm consistently envious of my friends in Civil Engineering. I'm sure it's a
grass-is-greener situation, but they seem to have "Decent Pay" but in a far
greater range of COLs, and with a far more entrenched expectation of long term
job stability. (One friend's employer still offers pensions, which is like
seeing someone driving a horse and buggy in tech)

I certainly hear a range of complaints as well, largely around funding and
political angles, but for the most part the things that I find most painful
about tech (work/life balance, high stress, long-term stability and career
growth) seem less prevalent.

Additionally, I also don't see civil engineering becoming quite as
commoditized towards "assembly line" work as a lot of CS often seems to
resemble, but again, this just based off the stories they tell me so I'm
waiting for another rail/harbor eng to come in and tell me why it's just as
miserable :)

I say all this because, as slim as the article was, you would not imagine how
much "just listen to your programmers" resonates with me. I've convinced
multiple coworkers to nickname me Cassandra for the number of times I've
precisely identified risk factors long before they were felt, and often even
when management makes soothing and affirming noises, having action result from
that is a rarity. I've certainly spent more time in the last 5 years of my
career "learning how to manage up" than learning how to do anything tech-
related.

Personal theory: It seems part-and-parcel with the pathology I've seen for
corps to be very averse to promote from within the ranks to management.

------
erikpukinskis
A recent example of a different way to do production is Alex Garland, director
of Annihilation (and Ex Machina). He spoke about it somewhat at length at
Google:

[https://youtu.be/w5i7idoijco?t=5m25s](https://youtu.be/w5i7idoijco?t=5m25s)

In my experience all of the major problems I’ve seen at software companies
were problems the rank and file employees knew exactly how to solve, but
weren’t allowed to.

It seems extremely hard for managers to let go of responsibility and let their
team take it on. I understand why: it’s the managers neck on the line.

But the fact is, in almost every case the manager doesn’t have the domain
knowledge necessary to solve their own problems. Almost by definition:
managers lead teams directly into the problems the manager can’t solve.

It takes real guts to regularly take a chunk of your resources and hand them
to an “underling” and yet that’s absolutely what they must do.

I’ve also seen a lot of examples of managers requiring employees to “prove
themselves”, often meaning they can prove they can think like the manager
thinks, before they can be trusted with an allocation of resources.

But this is pointless: the manager is already good at what they are good at,
and blind to what they are bad at. By definition hedging your own deficiencies
must be a leap of faith.

