Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

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I guess the problem are not managers per se, but non-technical managers. Somehow it is OK to have a pure salesperson / MBA manage engineers, but you would never put a developer in charge of the sales department.

I think many developers (not just coders, but in general technical people who make the actual product, designers, engineers, ...) feel there is an unfair primacy of managers / business people over developers / technical people. This is even reflected in the job descriptions: I hate the term "individual contributor" for example, it implies replacability and that non-ICs (managers) contribute more than one person.

Not every company has "bullshit" managers and for sure some developers are delusional. But these bullshit managers exist, and I believe this happens when you put people who are far away from making the product in charge. If the managers and executives are not intimately familiar with the product and the customers, then the product becomes some interchangable thing that you hustle. This can be disastrous for the work climate but also for the success of the company.

I always wondered if it was possible to build an inverted company organization, where developers/engineers were formally at the head of things, and much of the administrative tasks that management works on were subbed to specialists reporting to the developers.

If you look at a lot of pretty incredible projects that often were finished ahead of schedule or with groundbreaking capability, they often happen to be led by a deeply technical person. e.g. Hoover Dam, the SR-71, etc.

If you look at CEOs of tech companies, I believe a majority of them have an engineering undergrad degree of some form.

I work at a company that operates much like this. I've passed up on more lucrative opportunities in the past because it's such a great place to work as a developer as a result.

Do you think the company holds it’s own in terms of competitiveness vs other companies as well as making a reasonable profit to survive?

Actually, it implies that managers are multiplicative. You -hope- that it's a value > 1.0. I quite like the term individual contributor - it implies you're actually doing work (and that it falls on the rest of the business to make sure you know what work will be valuable).

But, yes. Bullshit managers invariably choose to take empowerment onto themselves, despite a lack of knowledge, and oftentimes without any real responsibility, either (i.e., they don't bear the consequences of their decisions).

So much this.

I even worked at one incredibly toxic organization for a year, before I left, where sales people would literally roam the office, grab a dev, and task them with a customer request.

This company was in a very specialized niche market, and was basically the only player. The only thing I couldn't figure out is why someone else hadn't come along and eaten their lunch, because they were suffering from chronic under-funding. Getting them to commit to migrating to AWS was a major eye opener for them; since they suddenly had to actually pay bills or they'd lose the whole operation.

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