[serviceberry]

> I cant work for someone who doesn't understand what I do.

But you already do. Unless you're working for a tiny startup, your CEO or the Board probably doesn't understand the specifics of your code.

You can't run a large company by making every person super-involved in every detail. You have layers of abstraction that make it possible to reason about an org of hundreds or thousands of employees. The Board trusts the CTO to oversee technology. Your CTO trusts your director / VP / whatever to run a large chunk of it. That person delegates a smaller part of running the company to your boss.

The whole point of each layer is to abstract away some of the underlying messiness. They exercise professional judgment for day-to-day operations and provide a clean interface that provides health signals, requests resources as needed, etc. And I think what many folks miss is that it doesn't stop with their boss. It stops with you! Your boss generally trusts you to make design and implementation decisions and is expecting you to provide a reasonable interface to that. If your boss has a reasonably-sized team but is spending their day writing code, then honestly, why are they in a management position to begin with?

[jayd16]

For the sake of argument, a company could be structured such that your boss knows what you do and their boss knows what they do but not necessarily what you do.

[howthewut]

There are a lot of jobs where the bosses bosses boss does know the job as that’s where they started.

Your post has an authoritative tone but is too reductive and dismisses the real world often working in a completely opposite way, so I’m not sure it’s a credible argument.

[nkmnz]

He didn't say your bosses boss is not allowed to know what you do, but that they _not necessarily_ know what you do. It's like abstractions: they can be leaky, but you'd better still know who's responsible for what.

[gsf_emergency_2]

While we're on the topic of abstractions, the summary of Bertrand Russell comes to mind:

What is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first one is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.

I can think of 2 patches: first, "matter" ("it") can be replaced by "bit"..

(What is the nature of the responsibilities that come with telling people what to do? Towards those who pay, who, if they did not inherit, must also have been highly paid? Towards the work/workers: it certainly helps to understand the work, but if it is neither unpleasant nor necessary, then perhaps "supplying the why" shouldn't be called a responsibility :)

[cutemonster]

> jobs where the bosses bosses boss does know the job

Doesn't make sense.

With 7 - 10 reports per manager, that means the higher up boss or CEO should know how to do the jobs of 350 - 1000 different people. (7*7*7)

[HWR_14]

If you promote up, and you have 3 levels, then the CEO should have done the exact job of 3 people below him on his ascent.

[sosborn]

Hard disagree. Would it be helpful? Sure. But a good boss just needs to know when to trust the judgement and opinions of his subordinates.

Trouble comes when they don’t understand the work, but make decisions as if they do.

[benrutter]

Hypothetically, those jobs could all be very similar if your company did more or less one thing lots, like managing a whole bunch of plumbing contractor teams.

This is pretty far from the original example though.

[protocolture]

Specifics sure. I dont expect them to understand the specifics. I dont want them across every task.

But I also dont want to (and currently dont have to) explain specific risks regarding what I do, I dont have to justify how long things take, because my management understands that. We speak the same language. Its glorious.

I mean just comparing my clients that have relevant technical knowledge, vs the ones that dont, the clients that dont have that knowledge need "meetings" and "catchups" and immense email threads in the order of 10 times the ones that do understand. Thats measurable (to me) waste.

Another observation of mine is that non technical people really have no ability to recruit and manage technical people. I have seen multiple businesses brought low because the "technical" person brought in to manage the "technical" side of the startup actually had NFI. Or when they do accidentally hire someone competant, their requests for resources or time are ignored, even when well justified. The non technical founder or CEO either has to trust someone (which fails a lot) or they dont trust someone (and thats even worse).

[jt2190]

> I mean just comparing my clients that have relevant technical knowledge, vs the ones that dont, the clients that dont have that knowledge need "meetings" and "catchups" and immense email threads in the order of 10 times the ones that do understand. Thats measurable (to me) waste.

Which they pay you for? Otherwise why don’t you drop them as clients? I’m unclear how that’s “waste” from a business perspective.

[protocolture]

Waste from their perspective. And TBH I would rather be doing technical work than reexplaining technical work.

[asdf6969]

> you already do

Most of us rarely interact with these people so it doesn't matter. They're just the newest placeholder name in the emails I get every few months as they're shuffled around.

[roeles]

> But you already do. Unless you're working for a tiny startup, your CEO or the Board probably doesn't understand the specifics of your code.

From what I understand, Elon Musk previously spent his time on the line in Tesla.

[protocolture]

>If your boss has a reasonably-sized team but is spending their day writing code

They dont need to spend all day writing code, they need to spend their nights and weekends making sure their skills dont rust.

[GlacierFox]

So you want them to come to work and do their job, then go home and waste their nights and weekends doing a variation of your job?

How about, a proportion of their work day must be allocated to keeping up to date with the tools behind the thing they're attempting to manage?

[halfcat]

> So you want them to come to work and do their job, then go home and waste their nights and weekends doing a variation of your job?

No. This would be a person who already happens to spend their nights and weekends coding. There are plenty of people who like building things, whether it’s woodworking or software.

> How about, a proportion of their work day must be allocated to keeping up to date with the tools behind the thing they're attempting to manage?

Maybe, but it would need to be solving a real problem the team has, not just leetcode or some random thing. Part of sharpening the saw is the struggle, and subsequent overcoming, which requires solving a real problem.

But you also don’t want a manager owning a critical path project as the developer. Part of a manager’s effectiveness is being available. That doesn’t work in crunch time when a project needs head down coding all week to meet a deadline.

But if a manager is building a trading bot or chess engine on their own time, they will encounter all kinds of real world challenges.

[vasco]

If you get what you want you'll have a shitty Pull Request for you to review on Monday mornings with your eager boss waiting for your approval on the PR.

[tyre]

> waste their nights and weekends doing a variation of your job

Why is that a waste? I'm an EM and code both at work and on nights/weekends. During the work day, I spend most of my time helping other people directly (code review, talking through designs, 1:1s, xfn collab, etc.) To build larger things, I do them nights and weekends.

It's not a waste. I'm better as an EM because of it. And being a better EM gets me more of what I want (fixing healthcare).

Not everyone can do this—and at some point in my life maybe I can't either—but it absolutely makes me better at my job. I don't consider that a waste.

[aprilthird2021]

How are you a better EM because you code nights / weekends? Genuinely curious, as I have to choose managing or continuing as an engineer pretty soon

[halfcat]

Here’s some good food for thought on the engineer/manager decision, [0] and [1]. Good luck!

[0] https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum...

[1] https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pe...

[tyre]

Code review, respect from engineers, directly feeling the pain points in our development process, I can commit small features strategically (like if a partner team isn't getting a lot of love but we're under-resourced), better partner pairing with engineers, balancing tech debt with new features, shipping directly to users builds empathy

[windward]

>I can commit small features strategically (like if a partner team isn't getting a lot of love but we're under-resourced)

Like a 10X (cost) intern?

[mcny]

> Why is that a waste? I'm an EM and code both at work and on nights/weekends. During the work day, I spend most of my time helping other people directly (code review, talking through designs, 1:1s, xfn collab, etc.) To build larger things, I do them nights and weekends.

Please take care of your health. Humans need sleep, Even when you think you don't. Try to get enough sleep. Try to have at least some time during the day where you don't have any mental stress.

I have these videos that keep showing on my Instagram suggested reels that remind me that in a hundred or two after I am dead, literally nobody will have any clue I even existed. If hard work makes you happy, that's good. Keep working hard. However, definitely make time for sleep.

Controversial opinion: you shouldn't need drugs (caffeine) to help you wake up.

[GlacierFox]

For a lot of people, their job isn't 100% of their life and their weekends are reserved for... Life. I respect you though. I'm glad your job is something you enjoy to the extent you happily regularly extend it into your personal time.

[vasco]

You just don't know how to manage your time yet. This is every manager's first few months. The totality of your work should be done at work, or you're actually pretty bad at your job, efficiency wise at least. You'll tell yourself you're doing more than others, but eh.

Anyway, people told me that and I scoffed as well, so it's useless to type this, it's the type of thing you adapt after going through it.

[dasil003]

I tend to agree with your assessment of this post, however as you rise up as a manager and possibly executive, one of the most highly valued behaviors is responsiveness. Knowing things and responding quickly, even after hours, can grease a lot of wheels in a large org.

This is actually another argument against coding as a manager. There’s value in staying connected to the craft, and being able to navigate the code base and answer specific questions with facts has a good amount of value. However in a large technical organization with distributed system the hard problems are always people problems, and hence if you want to grow as a manager you need to orient primarily in that direction. It’s okay to spend some time “staying sharp”, but it can be career limiting if you don’t recognize the higher level problems that only a manager can solve.

[ownagefool]

We actually can't judge this without really looking at outcomes.

If the parent leans on the hard earned skills to make better decisions that improves outcomes for their team and by extension the org, then it's entirely possible it makes them a better manager.

Where it gets complicated is questions non-related to this:

- Who and how is anyone measuring outcomes? This is often very difficult in abstract.

- Is the org actually setup to allow these teams to flourish? Will the measurement be fair, or is there effectively internal sabotage?

- What's the reward for being better? Would the parents life actually be materially better for making the effort?

Personally, I agree with the parent. On average, having good ICs making your IC decisions lead to better outcomes. Where there's grey areas is there's more than 1 way to structure this. Player managers are definitely valid. Better than non-technical managers with good soft skills making poor engineering decisions over and over.

Where I'd disagree is the continuous effort. Once you've reached a certain level, a lot of what happens below syntax. Occasionally you end up managing something you don't understand with contention in the team.

At this point, you either invest or defer. The problem with the latter, in my experience, is very few devs have experience with commercials, so most of the arguments are based on laziness, interests, or purism, rather than outcomes.

For the record, whilst there's managers we like working for, if they're not able to extract reward for business outcome for the few that chase that, are they actually any good?

[protocolture]

However the professional development is achieved is fine, as long as it is achieved. But most people I know do it outside of business hours.

[joeblubaugh]

> they need to spend their nights and weekends making sure their skills dont rust.

Life is more than work

[protocolture]

Yeah, theres also personal and professional development.

[KittenInABox]

There's also maybe being an involved parent. Or a caretaker.

[locusofself]

Thank you

[ssalazar]

Counterpoint: I don't want a boss who is so detached from the rest of life & society that they have copious free time on nights and weekends to practice coding.

[asdf6969]

Do you read books about management in your evenings?

[protocolture]

No but I do take time in my afternoons to learn new skills.