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Comment by rcoder | Hacker News Reader

While I agree with the basic tenet that experienced developers make better direct managers for other developers, I strongly disagree that "any programmer can do it", or that "biz guys can't learn programming", much less the assertion that "business" is somehow trivially easy compared to coding.

Doing a good job as a manager is hard. You need to triangulate between a lot of disparate opinions and viewpoints, negotiate compromises, and help your team develop and advance without hurting the larger group's goals. It takes empathy, good communication, and the ability to squelch your own opinion when circumstances call for it. None of those attributes are universal in engineers.

In fact, just about everything in a startup is hard: sales, recruiting, design, marketing, etc. Pretending otherwise or asserting that only engineers have something special to contribute is IMHO toxic and short-sighted.

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Yup. Both you and the op of this thread are correct.

Managers not knowing enough about the field they manage can cause problems.

In the same way employees not knowing enough about managing can also cause problems.

Essentially, if either side views itself in some way superior than the other (the manager usually views his job as more important in the grander scheme, and naturally is in a position of control and thus thinks himself superior, the employee views himself as the one who actually knows how/is doing the work and thus views himself as superior) problems can and probably (at some point) will occur.

Respect for all the different fields that go into making a company work is a very necessary thing to keep everything running smoothly--this way the company is only battling what the world throws at it/unavoidable risks and problems that occur--not itself.

I think this is a really good insight, a lot of the problems people in this thread have complained about can be attributed to bad managers. Balancing business requirements and technical requirements is a difficult thing to do, all the while ensuring everyone feels special/validated/acknowledged.

Parsing out what each camp feels is the most important thing to do, and translating that to something each camp can understand is one of those critical management skills that is hard to teach.

Every programmer needs to know management- even if to just manage oneself. But the better you can communicate the reality of of your technical requirements, the better the business unit will be able to prioritize their requirements. It shouldn't be us vs. them.

"toxic" is such a great word in this context. I've seen this kind of disrespect for other parts of the organization take down a small company that was otherwise performing just fine.

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