[hangonhn]

"I don't know. If you have a team that is able to consistently ship products that work and are well received by your existing client base, you probably do have some badass tech guys."

From my experience, a good manager can ship with bad enginners but good engineers cannot ship with a bad manager. This is from the perspective from an engineer.

We engineers need to stop kidding ourselves. We are good at certain problems but getting something out the door and running a company requires much more than what we are expected to be good at. This is why blogs like PG's and Joel Spolsky have such a following. They explain difficult concepts to engineers in a way engineers will understand. Not everything they write about are revelations to the whole world but they are to many engineers. Human-centric design? Other industries have done it for decades, etc. We need to know our own limitations if we want to go beyond them or make the conscious decision to not get better at it and let someone else handle it.

[nostrademons]

Good engineers can ship with a bad manager, but it basically requires one of the engineers "managing up" and taking on the role of manager without pissing off his actual manager. That's a delicate balance to strike, but there are some folks (usually experienced engineers who have been around the block a few times, or folks who have previously held manager/executive positions but "downshifted" because they really like to code) that can pull it off.

[collyw]

That sound like my situation where my team leader is not very experienced (or good in my opinion). As such I often refuse to do things the way he suggests. "Just do it like this". When the word "just" is part of the phrase, it means that he probably hasn't thought it out very thoroughly.

[nostrademons]

When I've seen this done effectively, the engineer never outright refuses to do things the way their manager says. Instead, they take responsibility for educating their manager, in a way that the manager can understand and without threatening their ego. So if the manager says "Just do it like this", your response should be "That won't work because X, Y, and Z. However, I could do it like this, and it will have these costs and benefits and take me this long, and that's why I believe this is a superior course of action." At all points the decision is still up to the manager, but the senior engineer has brought enough data and experience to bear that they can convince their manager that it was a good idea to begin with.

[Sakes]

I am all too familiar with only being good at certain things. My zombie startup almost failed before we had a chance to breathe. I was a developer driving around Houston, beating on doors to sell my product. And of the 30 organizations I approached, it did not result in one single meeting. I suck, so severely suck, at sales and anything to do with communicating with non technical people.

But about going beyond my own limitations, rather than trying to be all things, we just brought on some new partners to handle the marketing/sales, and things are finally starting to look up.