[jeremyx]

This article, (and many others), has a tone that some people ("geeks" in this case) are like another species of human origin that only the most skilled manager has learned to tame.

According to this article, they hate bureaucracy, filling out time-sheets and want flexible working hours. I guess I'm a geek in need of special management.

Who really believes this crap?

[kolektiv]

Couldn't agree more. There's this odd implication, after listing a load of usually pointless make-work tasks and tedious process, that geeks are somehow odd for disliking this. In reality, you're just dealing with a group of people who, because of the nature of what they do with a lot of their life, are perhaps better than average at seeing and analysing that state of affairs. The rest of your company probably doesn't like it much either, but they're perhaps not quite as sensitive to pointlessness as people who deal with it much more.

What you should be learning from the things that "your geeks" (blech) dislike, is what the rest of your company also dislikes but isn't telling you. The fact that you can fill in the timesheets for 15 people should show you exactly how pointless they are. You already know what they're doing! What are you trying to track exactly? I'm presuming you're not paying them based on the timesheets, otherwise they probably wouldn't let you fill them in.

That's just a small example. You don't have some weird sub-species. You have people who are attuned to certain things as a side effect of their job/life choices. Now work out what the rest of your company are attuned to, and go and listen to them as well.

[xk_id]

> Who really believes this crap?

You'd be surprised who believes and applies it. I'm doing a university degree that is supposedly a combination between CS and business/management. For some reason, however, 99% of the students enrolled are heartbreakingly disconnected from anything CS; most of them hope to become management consultants. I've worked with those people in group projects, and trust me, they are exactly the kind of techniques junkies, who sacrifice all humane common sense [1] and become this sort of compulsive manipulators who keep tailoring their attitude towards the team to the point where it stops making any effin sense whatsoever. I am starting to think the reason why those techniques end up actually working is because they appear so convoluted and ridiculous from the outside that you're just going to comply out of confusion. Or maybe it's out of pitty.

[1] If we are to be rigorous, then "common sense" is just another technique, learned and applied. There's nothing sacred about it, so if it necessary it should be replaced with a more effective "sense". However, what I tried to emphasize is that the techniques like the ones in the article are very, very buggy.

[car54whereareu]

Show me someone who likes filling out time sheets, wants inflexible working hours, loves bureaucracy, and respects authority more than ideas. I don't know anyone like that, so I must only know geeks.

[marcosdumay]

I know some three of four people like that.

[car54whereareu]

Who?

[belthasar]

I hate labels like these.

Why can't I be a developer? Does the author have such endearing terms for people in sales or marketing?

[AndrewDucker]

People who have worked with IT geeks and people in other areas, and know that not all people are the same, and that different kinds of people have different preferences, aptitudes and approaches?