Absolutely true. We need a culture where management is done by engineers.
This means we need to step up as engineers and start becoming managers.
But we also need to refuse to work for managers who are incompetent.
IF you're a programmer and you're reporting to someone who is not the CEO and is not an engineer, then you need to find another job and tell them why.
Time to stop working for startups run by CEOs who have nothing more than a business degree. IF the CTO is a competent engineer and the CEO has some domain expertise that's fine.
At amazon my boss, literally, had wanted to be a prison guard and gone to school for that. He was a terrible manager. They didn't even hire engineers to be managers, they just got these random incompetents. His boss was right out of the DMV. It was that way all the way up the chain of command to bezos. When nobody between you and the CEO, including the CEO, is a competent engineer, you're not going to be managed well. (and Amazon's software quality reflects that, despite the constant hype the site is a tragedy of bad design.)
Absolutely agree on this. Managers should have an engineering background. Managers and Technical Leads should be chosen from those who are bored with the engineering aspect (eg programming, designing, implementing) and want to focus on bigger challenges like leading a technical project.
Managers who only manage people have no clue about what it takes to think technically, so they tend just to apply their human management techniques to a technical AND human problem. Engineers can become managers, but manager only people cannot become engineers during the course of leading a project.
> Absolutely true. We need a culture where management is done by engineers.
I'm not so sure, you want engineers to be engineering. You want good managers to be managing. The skillsets don't have much overlap and people who are good at one might be lousy at the other.
Someone who does not understand how software is produced cannot manage the process of producing software.
It's easy to learn to manage programmers, I've done it, and I did it by dealign with a lot of bad managers.
In 25 years I've yet to meet a manager who was good at managing software development who did not have an engineering background. At best, the best managers sat by and let the programmers run the show and they themselves just helped with interpersonal problems and hr, and spend their time doing some project management type efforts.
The idea that managers possess something magical that engineers don't have is false.
Or maybe over decades I've just randomly never seen it. And I've worked at places like Amazon and Microsoft-- at amazon the managers were not engineers and it really sucked. At microsoft the mangers were engineers and at least in that regard it was much better.... except at the higher levels where it became political and the mangers stopped being engineers, and thus projects got behind.
At AWS, engineering management is technical all the way up to and including Charlie Bell. It's not really different from any other top tech company in that respect.
This means we need to step up as engineers and start becoming managers.
But we also need to refuse to work for managers who are incompetent.
IF you're a programmer and you're reporting to someone who is not the CEO and is not an engineer, then you need to find another job and tell them why.
Time to stop working for startups run by CEOs who have nothing more than a business degree. IF the CTO is a competent engineer and the CEO has some domain expertise that's fine.
At amazon my boss, literally, had wanted to be a prison guard and gone to school for that. He was a terrible manager. They didn't even hire engineers to be managers, they just got these random incompetents. His boss was right out of the DMV. It was that way all the way up the chain of command to bezos. When nobody between you and the CEO, including the CEO, is a competent engineer, you're not going to be managed well. (and Amazon's software quality reflects that, despite the constant hype the site is a tragedy of bad design.)