Guess what? You're being micromanaged by MBA's because otherwise, despite all your l33t coding skills, you're f-ing useless.
Now that I'm over 80 credit hours in, I have to say that my Micro and Macroeconomics classes were two of the most interesting courses in my entire program.
Very easily identified early in school as the ones who say "I don't want to know all this history shit" or "I don't want to know all this writing shit"
Especially true if the business ever needs to write a technical proposal to win a contract. Very important to have engineers who can read and write then.
There are a couple of questionable assumptions baked into that statement, IMO. First, that a "liberal arts education" (by which I assume you mean earning a 4 year degree from a liberal arts university) definitely means you will come out able to read and write to a superior degree. Maybe if you major in English or Philosophy, otherwise, I wouldn't take that as a given.
Also, there seems to be an implicit assumption that the only way to gain a solid grasp of reading and writing well is through a liberal arts education (again, I'm assuming you mean a formal liberal arts education). I'm not sure I buy that. The best way to learn to write, IMO, is to write a lot, read a lot, and solicit feedback on your writing. None of that requires a formal liberal arts education.
Now if you aren't necessarily referring to formal / university education, then we probably don't disagree. I certainly agree with the point that having solid reading and writing skills is a valuable thing!
In both cases, sitting there and watching was excruciating in that "holy crap this is awful, just make it stop for the sake of the poor guy" kind of way.
But you know what? Some of us got better at it - the ones who made an effort. This made me realize that we do not force enough liberal arts on engineers in school. In fact, I was prohibited from taking many art classes - I got no credit towards my degree for them because they were perceived as "soft". That is crazy.
I also think that reading and posting on places with high quality discussion like HN and reddit circa 2008 can really improve your communication skills.
Ridiculous. I know this stereotype exists, but I don't know many programmers who actually hold that attitude. The "business shit" is intellectually easier and not at all uninteresting. The payoff in learning it is quite high: in a functional organization, you get more respect and money for a relatively small investment. There might be some clueless 23-year-olds out there who reflexively dislike "business" because of Marxist-academic indoctrination, but that's a rare and transient state.
If anything, the MBA micromanagers try to encourage this attitude by taking the "I will handle all of this" approach with the business side and the "big picture". They make it their turf by assertion, then wonder why the engineers under them seem not to give a shit.
Engineers tune out when they don't have any power or control. It's a survival mechanism. If you can't do anything about it, don't waste cycles on it.
We tend to prefer not working in teams, other people slow us down and cause confusion in our work.
But America's insistence on a "team" based work culture really hampers those like me. We can get 10x the amount of work done individually as we can as part of a team if left to our devices - but this is frowned upon, indeed looked at as a social "problem".
I * sincerely* blame MBA culture for this detrimental attitude.
I guess my question is, as a self-identified 'solitary worker', would you take it upon yourself to leave a project if it reached a point where team expansion was necessary? Is there any good way to manage someone like you to get you to contribute to a larger project, or if it a lost cause?
I much prefer the latter to the former since I don't have to work about anyone else makes changes to stuff without my knowledge but I'm still on the team, still met with the others to discuss what we are working on and how it impacts X or Y.
- no exposure to new skills and techniques. This particular employee is pretty fond of cut-and-paste, and we've been refactoring to fix a lot of that. As we refactor, the ground is sort of shrinking beneath his feet, because he isn't willing to work on other people's code. If you aren't willing to learn new techniques and read other people's code, your portion of the codebase is going to accumulate technical debt while the rest moves forward.
- no big-picture perspective. I love to stick my nose into every architectural discussion, and I think it's beneficial for us to plan big decisions as a team, to try and find the best solution. From experience, a siloed employee won't be interested in getting involved in these large-scale discussions, because they haven't kept up with the rest of the codebase, and they don't have an interest in it.
Essentially, having all your team hived off from each other, doing their own thing:
- gives you a very low bus factor. If one guy moves on, dies, whatever, suddenly you've got a dark area of your codebase with built up debt and no knowledge.
- reduces the cohesiveness of your design. At the best, the high level plan will be dictated by management or a single architecture, and each employee builds their part according to spec. This seems to reduce autonomy and job satisfaction, and it presumes none of the coders have any good ideas about architecture (wrong).
If you have techniques or suggestions for getting around these issues, I'd be glad to hear them. It is a big problem that some very good technical people aren't necessarily very social.
Working in a siloed environment doesn't mean not learning new skills or techniques. And I don't mean that you are only working on the same project/chunk of code the entire time. We would often switch projects so that what I'm working on today is completely different that last week and has been touched/edited/tweaked by just about everyone on the team at some point.
Having a Big Picture perspective is vital be being able to work individually. You have to know how your work will ultimately impact everyone else and how their will impact you.
I don't mean that everyone is working on completely separate projects but that Employee 1 might be working on a feature enhancement on version 4.5.3 while Employee 2 is working on a refactor of the back end code and I might be working on implementing a change control request on version 4.5.4.
Perhaps this is a better way to explain: everyone is working on the same Project but on individual and separate Tasks
Also, you can reply even during the cooling-off period by hitting the 'link' link.
Major feature enhancements in which multiple devs touch the same set of files.
There are probably ways around these issues, just some instances where I've had to sit next to someone and work out a bug/problem.
Not every project requires team expansion and teams vary in strength and productivity. But in general, yes I would leave if I were required to stand in front of 9 "team members" every morning and tell them my deeds and troubles. At this point, the challenges have been solved and the single hardest problem in the project is coordinating everyone. I get bored and frustrated at this point causing me to seek a more interesting project.
Software is fundamentally a creative discipline - creativity rarely occurs in a committee.
A 10 man team can certainly do more work then I can (in general). But if I'm unable to work properly in a 10 man team, I SHOULDN'T be on that team. Not all of us are effective in the traditional agile environment - give us a nook somewhere and let us solve problems independently. You'll get far more value out of us that way then adding us as the 11th member of that team.
I just want to point out that there are different aspects of "managing". There's tactical, command and control, administrivia type stuff, and there's "solving problems, acquiring resources and providing high level coordination" and then there's "strategic decision making" kind of management. One can certainly lack interest in one of those, but might find the others interesting if exposed to that part of things.
Personally, I consider most of what most managers do, to be "administrivia" which is of very low value, and I'd have no interest in ever doing that. But when a manager it tasked with actually identifying and solving problems, making strategic decisions, etc., that part can actually be as intellectually challenging as programming and can actually be fun in it's way.
It's not about control, some people just seem to be allergic to meetings, dealing with stakeholders, etc. It's a perfectly valid viewpoint to have: some people just want to write code.
That's absolutely true as well. I was largely that way when I was younger, but over time I've grown more interested in the other aspects of things.
That changed a few years ago (can't remember the exact reason why) when I started learning about the industry I was working in (because it was something I wanted to know about) and saw my work getting better and coming back with fewer and fewer change requests and a couple of Oh, that was a great way of doing X. You get it!
Made a world of difference.
I think the point is that you can do something about it - it just requires stepping out of the engineering midset for moment now and then. I've seen this fatalistic attitude frequently, both in software developers and "real" engineers (mechanical, electrical, etc). It's not healthy for the engineer or the organization, and I can't quite figure out where the attitude comes from.
With managers, you can't take the same approach. You cannot simply tell your boss that his managerial style is nukular buttfail. That gets you fired.
Engineers tune out when they don't have any power or control. It's a survival mechanism. If you can't do anything about it, don't waste cycles on it.
Yeah, I've definitely seen this. But, on the flip side, I've seen manager types who want the technical people to get move involved in understanding the business issues and develop more of an ability to contribute at that boundary (to the extent that such a thing actually exists) between the "business world" and the "IT world".
If you folks will indulge me a bit of (related) self-promotion, I've written two recent blog posts[1][2], touching on a specific technique and methodology that I see gaining some steam, which deals with operating at that "chasm" between the worlds. In the first part, I argue that, in the future to come, developers are going to need to learn more about the business world AND that managers are going to have to learn more about technology.
[1]: http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/02/so-what-is-capability-ca...
[2]: http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/01/why-capability-cases-are...