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Comment by VexXtreme | Hacker News Reader

The biggest irony lies in the fact that in most traditional companies managers (people who manage developers) are usually the people who were never smart enough to make it as developers in the first place.

My company does this all the time. Didn't do well enough at the job interview or you're a total bozo and poor at understanding technical concepts/writing code? No problem! They'll appoint you as a project manager and you will get a team of developers to manage. At the same time, the brightest and the best engineers rarely get promoted because they are keeping their heads down and actually getting shit done. And there is little incentive for the company to promote such people because they lose a skilled and productive programmer if they do that (they don't care about anything except for how fast you can crank out code - one of the typical ailments of consulting companies).

It's a very sad state of affairs. Makes me want to quit really.

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Yes, and they get to give you lots of work then go home. Meetings and checklists for them. Plus, every now and then they get to explain how to do your job to you. It's kind of weird. I've been doing this for 20 years. I was wondering if anyone else noticed.

I know a huge bank that had problems that every developer they promoted, quit.

It was because their managment positions were so stressful and so communication heavy, that most developers were totally not suited for it, and just plainly quit.

Technical types tend to think that there's not much to the task or process of motivating and managing a team.

The people that promote individuals into management roles are often just as naive. The individuals are expected to develop new skills simply by virtue of having been promoted.

Maybe I'm arguing semantics, but to me project manager != manager. I have run both PM & dev teams, and often PM's are paid far less than dev's. In a lot of cases I wouldn't consider a move from being a dev to a PM to be a promotion in any sense.

A proper Manager who is coaching his staff, performing performance reviews, ensuring the team has all the resources needed to do their jobs as efficiently as possible, protecting the team from unnecessary bullshit meetings/interruptions, etc is a completely different story.

It's a fallacy to believe that good developers should make good managers and vice versa. I've had great managers that haven't written a line of production worthy code in their life, I've had horrible managers that were genius developers. Companies without a technical career path create bad managers because great developers that should go on to be Principle Engineers and Architects have no choice but to get into HR in order to advance their career even if they aren't fit for it.

You'd have to be a good developer who wants to be a good manager, or a good manager who is smart and cares enough about technology to absorb a lot and obsess about the details. I think the implication here is even if you have those traits the opportunity doesn't exist at most companies.

There are people saying this (more or less): leaders can be used in a any field, even a field they don't know.

Being a technical person, I used to doubt this too. But having seen to many bad managers in such a short time, I believe it's true. When you are senior enough, in a small company, you don't need a technical supervisor. You just need someone you can trust, who gives you political backup and who will evaluate you on your results.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...

The Peter Principle is a belief that, in an organization where promotion is based on achievement, success, and merit, that organization's members will eventually be promoted beyond their level of ability. The principle is commonly phrased, "Employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence." In more formal parlance, the effect could be stated as: employees tend to be given more authority until they cannot continue to work competently. It was formulated by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book The Peter Principle,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

This should be required reading: http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Essential_Drucker.ht...

true, I've experienced that as well. The morons who wrote shitty code, made project managers.

So all it takes to be a manager at your company is to bomb the job interview? I could use a pay raise, which company do you work for?

sometimes gifted devs are horrible managers.

Speaking as a developer I have to say the arrogance in this post is very disturbing. It reeks of someone who has no idea what they're talking about and can't understand the challenges people other than developers face. To think that managers are people who aren't as smart as you are, or are people who couldn't hack it as a developer is ridiculous and naive and arrogant.

If your job is that shitty, and you're that smart and good, quit and find a better job.

And in fact the amount of shit that corporate developers are protected from is phenomenal. Getting shit out of the way of developers is the job of these managers.

Now of course, some companies are better or worse than others, some managers are better or worse than others and so on.

Personally I don't see myself a manager because I lack the social skills. In some days I barely remember to do minor things like sending out an email to my team at the end of the day or ask about the status of some roadblock.

Developers are supposed to be grateful that managers protect them from shit from even dumber and insane managers above them? Nope. Why not just fire those insane managers slinging shit everwhere.

It's not that black and white.

Ofttimes, what looks like meaningless corporate bullshit to a developer looks like valuable fertilizer to some other part of the organization, or to a regulatory body, or to something else that makes the company go. "looks like" phrasing was intentional here.

I was a damned good developer back in the day, and am working on being a good manager (of managers at this point). There is an insane amount of red tape that sprouts up over time in any large assembly of people. Some of it has some positive purpose somewhere; some of it has no evident purpose.

The best managers seek to protect their teams from unnecessary BS, but that doesn't necessarily mean eradicating it from the company. Shielding can be just as effective locally, at a tiny fraction of the cost.

Maybe we are talking about two different things. There's no qualms with stupid requirements, red tape, or regulations. The bullshit that I am talking about are the ethical lapses, the lying, the backstabbing, the disrespect, and the threats. There's no situation where that is legitimately valuable to some other part of the org. Anyone out there who thinks this is necessary or just part of the game needs to do an ethics check.

The parent might be arrogant, but he also happens to be right. A lot of managers are simply incompetent and not that smart.

In my experience, it's usually _not_ the line managers but the people above them. I've left several jobs, but almost always wasn't because of my immediate manager.

Nope. No way. I'm a developer who has worked with a lot of managers on group projects in many different business classes. I have had all sorts of problems in group projects because by and large the managers all want to do the project during work hours while I am coding and testing as fast as possible so I can get home by 8pm. So, I'm going to go ahead and say bullshit to "the challenges people other than developers face." Maybe you can explain the challenges? I can imagine the difficulty in two manager trying to out-bullshit each other. This does not constitute an inherent difficulty in the job, but is a difficulty in living with themselves. If managers are shitty to each other, its not because of the job description, its because they are shitty to other people.

I'm not a manager, I'm an engineer, but I'll speak up for the managers...

The challenge managers have to face is balancing competing priorities. If you're a manager, you have customers/users that you need to please to keep the money rolling in. You have an executive who often has very strong opinions about how to please those users. You have employees that each have their own career goals and interests, which may not necessarily be aligned with yours. You have cross-functional peers who you frequently need to rely on for favors, and yet often speak a totally different language from you. And you somehow have to make all of the above groups happy, or at least not totally pissed off at you, to keep the organization functioning.

I dunno what your job description is like, but mine (as a senior SWE at Google) is "Figure out how to make users happy". If you don't face similar ambiguities in your job description, it's because there's a manager somewhere up the org chart who did all the messy work of listening to what everybody else wanted and somehow harmonized it all into something halfway buildable. If you have a spec you're following, there was somebody out there who wrote it. If you're getting paid, it means somebody out there sold the product, and that usually requires listening to all the customers out there and figuring out what they want in common. None of these tasks do themselves.

That would be great except hat is not he real world. In the real world managers provide no value. Many are bold enough to admit to me that from the start they planned their careers around doing as little real work as possible and are focused only on ladder climbing and getting head count under them. My job description is wide open, I do all phases from conceiving of a project, to selling it to internal users, to coding and testing, to deploying and getting feedback. It's essentially intrapreneurship. I have never met a dev manager that understands software well enough to even begin to help in these regards. The ones that actually tried to organize development simply tried to dumb down the work to something they could understand like reports. As for the org knowing what they want, they want head count and exposure. I I could code these things I would be CEO.

The real world is a really broad place. If your manager doesn't add any value, quit and be CEO. I've done that before and I'll do it again if I find that I'm in a position where being part of an organization subtracts more value than it adds. For the moment, though, I've found that my manager and the rest of my organization adds a bunch of value in very subtle ways that I wouldn't get if I were out in my own startup.

> If your job is that shitty, and you're that smart and good, quit and find a better job.

That's the crux. If you really are that good, it shouldn't be too hard to leverage your skills somewhere better.

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