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Comment by brimstedt | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, far too much talent is wasted into making good developers into bad managers.

It's great with managers that have domain knowledge, but having domain knowledge does not make you a good manager.

And how long does that domain knowlege survive as technology moves on, and the manager isn't getting hands on. You could have great domain knowlege when you move into management age 35, back in say 2010, and just 10 years later you'd have very little hands on knowlege of say AWS. Go back 10 years further and while you might be a whiz at building win32 programs in 2000 when you were 35, how do those skills apply in 2010 let alone 2020 when you're 55.

Being on the move is part of the skill. I expect a good developer to be effective in a ew tech faster than a younger one barely knowing one tech. I think THAT is part of the appeal of a senior+ dev, having proven they will be able to adapt to the new framework or the next pivot.

I believe one of the major skills a senior+ dev has to have is to see through the marketing and impl. detail fluff and instead understand the underlying concepts and which aspects a specific implementation has wrt. the underlying concepts.

While frameworks and libraries change all the time, the concepts do not.

At some point, languages and frameworks become as interchangeable as different brands of tools. Sure, you can have a favorite brand with strengths and weaknesses, but someone who's used one powered screwdriver or handheld sander can pick up any other one quickly, and it's actually possible to reach that point with code.

Yup. If you know how to think like a coder, you can keep picking things up. I've been coding for 28 years and I've dipped in and out over the years. I keep abreast of things enough to know where to find the most up to date information and how I would learn it if I need or want to.

I'd compare it to using Wikipedia/web search for basic facts. Even if you don't know the capital of Morocco off the top of your head, you know how to answer that question.

Human languages are similar: I've studied six + have a Linguistics degree, and even languages in families I've never studied before are a lot easier for me to pick up than somebody who's only studied 1 non-native language.

AWS is superficial domain knowledge. That indeed will rot.

“Building client-server architectures to run on the internet” is domain knowledge that hasn’t significantly changed in the last 20 years.

So much this!

The "talent" we need is definitely not technical. Software projects are a magnitude more about "people" and "negotiation" than it is "how do do this technical widget efficiently" and "how can we make this arch scale" (these are all relatively solved problems, despite us trying to reinvent the wheel). Even projects that fail due to, on the surface, technical problems are actually a result of people and leadership, and the effect they have on the project.

This is the part that I think a lot of technical people really misunderstand, hence all the negative sentiment about turning developers into managers. A stellar incredible "10x" team of super talented developers can not negate the bad people dynamics within a project caused by bad leadership or lack thereof.

> Software projects are a magnitude more about "people" and "negotiation" than it is "how do do this technical widget efficiently" and "how can we make this arch scale" (these are all relatively solved problems, despite us trying to reinvent the wheel). Even projects that fail due to, on the surface, technical problems are actually a result of people and leadership, and the effect they have on the project.

If you think the current crop of managers are doing all this, I am afraid you are mistaken.

OTOH, sometimes you get stuck working for the CEO's nephew who just graduated with his BA in business management and has zero domain knowledge.

I do love your reply :)

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