[swedegeek]

I have been wanting to write a much more ranty version of the OP for a really long time. Yes, there are and always will be bad managers out in the world. But it makes me laugh when the immediate reaction people have is to just get rid of all the managers, because developers are all clearly rock stars, way smarter than managers in all ways, and can perfectly self-organize themselves. Really? I would love to see such a group in action. I imagine they must exist, but I also strongly believe people hear the myths of such teams much more than they actually have experienced such a thing themselves.

Meanwhile, I'm going to head back to figuring out to get a QA member to stop being so toxic to our overall efforts, make sure a developer properly knows the expectations on how to interact with the rest of the team, sort out the next 3-6 months of priorities with the executive team accounting for all internal department requests and our lengthy product roadmap, help a lead dev resolve an issue with a really smart developer who has taken twice as long as expected on a straightforward task, find time to look through a whole bunch of resumes that are likely nowhere near where what we're seeking in candidates, and then make sure all the right people receive updates to all of those activities. We'll see what tomorrow brings.

To be clear, I absolutely love my job. It's extremely rewarding to see even one of those items get checked of the list in a given day, or the not-always-well-communicated but good-intentioned appreciation that a single member of my team sends my way after helping him remove an obstacle or provide some sort of useful feedback. It's definitely a much different type of challenge from when I was a full-time dev, but I honestly get at least as much out of the experience as I did solving problems with code.

I can't point people at a team of 100 developers that operate like a herd of unicorns, negating their 1 bumbling manager. However, I can provide examples of teams that perform really quite well and have competent managers who deserve at least a bit of credit in their teams' successes.