5 Jan
2012
5 Jan
'12
12:51 p.m.
And that crazy idea that being in
"management" (overhead positions
that require no real brainpower) as opposed to creating things has
really crippled our industry.
It's almost as bad as the idea that management is pure overhead that
brings no value.
I mean that. Management _can_ be pure zero/negative-production
overhead. But hey, so can any other position. And a really good
manager is a godsend.
There's a tendency for computer geeks to wear blinkers specific to
their field, to think that anyone who can't make a computer sit up and
dance must be stupid (cf the "no real brainpower" remark above), as if
computer technical smarts were somehow the only true kind of smarts.
Then those same computer geeks wonder why they fall flat on so many
other aspects of life. Out-negotiated. Out-friended. Out-written.
Out-organized. When they are so much "smarter" than "everyone else".
I got news for you, wondering geeks. You're judging everything by your
own metric, judging "smart" by your own kind of smarts, missing out on
so many other kinds of smarts. Interpersonal smarts. Kinesthetic
smarts. Musical smarts. Smarts which are far more useful than your
kind in so many other fields.
And, yes, one of those kinds of smarts is management smarts. The kind
of smarts that can take a disastrous disorganized clusterfuck of
(possibly individually highly talented) people and turn them into an
awesomely effective team. Part of the reason it's hard for computer
geeks to see this is that, like certain other jobs (notably sysadmin),
when management is done really well it's also really hard to notice,
except by others also highly skilled in the art.
We have a crop of highly talented, interested
programmers who are
bored to tears in meetings, and the work they SHOULD be doing is
being done by PFYs who wouldn't know elegant simplicity if it walked
up and pinched them on the ass.
A good example of management being done wrong. Not the second part -
elegance and simplicity are not always appropriate metrics to judge
code goodness by - but leaving _anyone_ "bored to tears" is bad
management.
None of what I said above should be mistaken to mean that good
management is easy or common. Really good managers are no more common
than really good coders, or really good cricket players, or really good
racecar drivers, or whatever else. Possibly less so; I suspect
management ability requires the confluence of more of the seven? eight?
basic kinds of smarts than many things do, making it rarer.
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