| Doing things right often sounds more complicated. Business people who don't take the time to listen and understand what they're managing will pick what sounds like the path of least resistance. If the buisness people cannot be reasoned with this will result in staff not telling them what they're really spending their time on. At this point management either a) steps back or b) buckles down and micromanages. Results:
a) Unless there is some internal leadership within the team or you have rather good and motivated people, this will result in the team doing what they want, which will mostly be CV-Driven-Development or playing with the new shiney. b) Important steps will be skipped, likely the team will feel the decisions are made outwith the group, yet the group suffers from the results of said decisions. Moral of the team will go down. This isn't specific to programmers, any time you get management that's willing to bury their head in the sand and not understand their subject matter, you've got this problem. Team performance will go down and if this results in rotating non-technical management who all end up going down this road, you'll breed programmers that simply think all managers are useless. This is the with career managers. The problem with technical managers is they often simply don't know how to manage. You want someone who can do both and who actually cares about delivering value to whomever your customer might be. |