[gymbeaux]

I think I’m conditioned to have reduced respect for managers because in my experience they are former devs who were “promoted” out of touching the code. As a result, when they offer technical advice, it’s bad technical advice, or at best merely “unhelpful”, usually because it’s obvious (e.g. “did you try {first thing I tried}?”

I pose that such people shouldn’t be devs or managers, but “manager” is a role that tends to be forgiving of under-qualification… because ultimately the good devs don’t need to be “managed.”

[asdfman123]

Those kinds of managers may not be coders but assuming they are actually good at managing (and know their limitations), they play an important role.

It’s important to respect that other people are bringing different things to the table. Everyone’s got different strengths and weaknesses.

[krageon]

> It’s important to respect that other people are bringing different things to the table. Everyone’s got different strengths and weaknesses.

It is also important to respect that there are a lot of people that may bring something to the table, but not necessarily a whole lot. Sure, they'll have strengths and weaknesses and they are whole human beings with lives and people that love them, but this doesn't mean they are good at their job. And it also doesn't mean that they're good in a management or dev setting.

[pmoriarty]

> Those kinds of managers may not be coders but assuming they are actually good at managing (and know their limitations), they play an important role.

What role is that?

[ambicapter]

Translating good decisions from these genius coders into management-speak (aka justifying good technical decisions with sound business acumen) and managing political capital in order to be able to push through non-negotiable technical efforts or, on the flipside, gain favor in exchange for not being able to do all the things we want to do.

[GoatOfAplomb]

Adding on to ambicapter:

Get the high-performing devs their good ratings and promotions. Get the low-performing devs moving better or off the team. Bring in more good devs.

[presentation]

Scenario 1: Bad Manager

- manager tells engineer to do something but doesn’t fully understand the context

- the engineer doesn’t fully understand it either but thinks they do, jumps to the conclusion that what’s needed is something complex, and thinks “no problem I’m 1337 and I got this”

- engineer spends the next three months crafting the Mona Lisa of code

- feature gets shipped and users… just don’t care about it since it didn’t actually solve their issues

- three months wasted from the perspective of the business, opportunities missed

- next time the engineer wants to do something technically great, the higher ups smack the plan down and tell them to get in line

- engineer quits in frustration

- company weakens

Scenario 2: better manager

- manager aligns with leadership to understand the end goals

- then works with product and engineers to figure out the best way to achieve that goal. Turns out some of it is minor product changes but most of it maybe is just clearer messaging, education, etc

- then ensures the engineers tasked to implement it are fully aligned on what they’re building and know who to go to for reference, so that there is no ambiguity from what the higher ups want vs what the engineers think they’re supposed to do

- this simpler idea is implemented in a week and released

- users love it

- the team gets more resources from higher up because of a track record of doing useful things

- engineer feels greatly productive and vital to the team

- this is 10x better than scenario 1 outcome and it’s mostly thanks to a good manager doing their job