[DannyB2]

I was going to write something similar.

A manager of anything, including technology, should have an understanding of what they manage. Not having that understanding is the fundamental problem. Any kind of "guides" to help such ill equipped managers is only a band aid that doesn't fix the actual underlying problem.

Technical managers may cost more an be harder to find. That might just be the cost of not screwing up things in major ways. Including potentially business destroying ways.

An additional clue: Not just the immediate managers of the worker bees, but going up the chain of management there should be people who understand the technology.

Nobody would accept the idea of a manager that didn't understand the business they are in. If technology is part of your business, and you don't understand technology, then you don't understand the business you are in and shouldn't be a manager.

[sokoloff]

> An additional clue: Not just the immediate managers of the worker bees, but going up the chain of management there should be people who understand the technology.

There's a natural (and I think fundamental) inversion that happens as you go up the leadership chain. The first level of supervision almost inevitably knows more than the most junior employee about their area of work. (Think a senior developer mentoring a new college hire.)

That may hold for two levels, but at some point, management is about breadth and not depth. The head of technical operations probably came from networking or systems or storage or database or communications, but probably didn't come from ALL of those, so is unlikely to know more about networking than the head of networking AND more about databases than the head of databases, etc. In fact, they may know next to nothing about some particular field of ops and yet still be the right choice to lead operations. (I was in this position in a prior role.)

So you get this weird situation where at the junior levels, the supervisor knows more than the supervised. At the more senior levels, that's usually inverted. And then you get people who determine that the senior person is clueless because they know more about their specialized field than the boss.

IMO, it's unreasonable to expect the CEO of Boeing to be an expert in finance, operations, aerodynamics, manufacturing, supply chain, engine design, certification rules, avionics, landing gear, radar, flight controls, and the 100 other disciplines needed to make Boeing work. I see no reason to think that technology is extra-special in that all managers of technologists need to be world-class technologists.

[orclev]

Fair enough, but at the same time when you start getting to the level where they don't know about the details they need to start trusting the people below them to make decisions and take their advice. Far too often you see technically incompetent CEOs making far reaching decrees about technical issues they know nothing about because of some random brain fart they overheard on the golf course with one of their buddies.

[DustinOfDenver]

I wish I could disagree... but is more like: they heard something they thought sounded like the tech they have and they could sell quickly.

[Bartweiss]

> So you get this weird situation where at the junior levels, the supervisor knows more than the supervised. At the more senior levels, that's usually inverted.

And on some level, this makes sense. A completely junior employee may well need substantial guidance, and if they aren't reliable that won't necessarily be easy to predict - so you get them a supervisor who can evaluate their work in full. A midlevel or upper-level manager ought to be competent enough to perform reliably, and it's more useful to have someone above them with skills they don't have.

(Of course, hiring is a mess, and "senior staff ought to be qualified and reliable" is not the same as "senior staff are...")

[DustinOfDenver]

I think you are correct and incorrect.. I am not suggesting "expertises". I am suggesting "Literacy"... at least enough to "detect B.S." of his immediate direct reports (and that part is also key).

In 4 levels of management the CEO is not to be the BS detector of the 1st level but most def. be "technical" enough to detect B.S. at the 4th and (maybe) the 3rd levels of management.

Those I admire and have studied: Disney, Elon, and Jobs (many others) could maybe detect down to the 2nd and 3rd levels. To do the impossible - you must have a grasp of the "possible"

[Bartweiss]

> A manager of anything, including technology, should have an understanding of what they manage.

Sometimes I think software people are lucky in this. Sure, non-technical management is too common, but mostly it just makes our lives harder. Talking to friends who work in process chemistry, civil engineering, and other high-stakes fields suggests that this is rarer, but nowhere near rare enough.

Obviously software has consequences, but usually mistakes can be caught in testing or otherwise mitigated. After hearing stories like an unqualified manager deciding that a pressure release valve is 'optional', it sounds like this still happens in settings where even the test suite can kill you.

[DustinOfDenver]

Excellent follow up!

I know a few product managers who think that managing a technical product can be reduced to entries in a backlog... and features are somehow separate from the technology that drives them. What the miss is... Technology "IS" the product.

[DustinOfDenver]

If what you directly manage is technical... then you must be technical and be able to communicate those opportunities up. I don't think anyone is suggesting that the entire management chain must be technical.