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0 pointstyingq8y ago0 comments

My experience is that a good non-technical manager will develop a relationship with a member of their team that fills that gap. Most of the "good" manangers I've worked for were good because of their soft skills.

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humanrebar8y ago· 2 in thread

I mentioned that approach, yes. But it can backfire if the team member is makes big mistakes. The non-technical manager will have a hard time identifying bad decisions before they blow up.

marcinzm8y ago

>I mentioned that approach, yes. But it can backfire if the team member is makes big mistakes. The non-technical manager will have a hard time identifying bad decisions before they blow up.

Why do you assume an out of date and no longer practicing manager will have a better chance of catching errors than causing them? There is a reason you hire experts and that reason is not so you can ignore them. If you're afraid of a single point of failure then you foster a collaborative blame-free culture where the engineers cross check each other.

I've had managers who would agree with you and generally they were bad managers who hadn't realized they were no longer Senior ICs.

humanrebar8y ago

I think people who make and collaborate on strategic technical decisions need up close and personal perspectives on in the trenches technical work. I think non-technical managers have a very hard time detecting when someone is blowing smoke. I think former engineers can turn into non-technical managers fairly easily if they aren't proactively contributing actual patches and reviews to their projects.

Collaborative, blame free technical culture is ideal, yes, but it requires technical leadership and some amount of technical strategy. Someone (or some committee I guess) has to be able to decide when a project costs more than it makes. Only someone technical can actually estimate the projects. You can collaborate in and delegate that estimation, but there still needs to be a decision somewhere.

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