| Good managers will not have a fetish for making decisions, but will, instead, ask you questions that reveal the motivation for their concern about a given technical solution, such as, "I've been told that we need to do X, and that Y solution does X, how does your solution handle the X requirement?" Where X could be a business requirement or a need that some other team in the company has. A good boss will bring his concerns forward and give you the opportunity to address them, and if you tell him this is a better solution for the X issue, then he'll trust you to do it and give you approval. If it turns out that your solution was worse for X, then when he has to be more careful in the future, he can remind you that X didn't get met last time and that is why he's not sure about this time. You then have to prove it or shape up. It's all about building trust-- with GOOD bosses. The problem is, good bosses are maybe %30. To many of them are simply people who were promoted to management because they are ambitious and good at playing politics and in a lot of companies their incompetence (eg: knowing nothing about software despite managing programmers) is seen as an advantage (that was the case at Amazon where my boss had trouble operating excel and his background was in criminal justice.) Hell, I once worked for an educational software company that higher ex-kindergarten teachers to manage programmers. They knew nothing, but they had been trained that "young ones" (eg us 20-30 year old artists and programmers) were not to be trusted.... we even got scolded once for stepping out of the office to have a conversation! It was a company run like a kindergarten class! Trying to explain technology in both of these examples to profoundly technology illiterate people was taken as "back talking". What they heard from some cousin (or once, I kid you not "bill gate's investment group might make an investment, so we need to get rid of our linux mail and file server and replace it with windows") .... was always more compelling than what their employees, who actually knew the situation, would tell them. I think their incompetence fed a need to put their foot down. In both cases the team collapsed as all the talent walked out the door. |