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this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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Upper management deserves everything it gets. Middle management is often underpaid and expected to do all the jobs of their own plus their superiors.
Some *organisational tasks will always be needed. Middle management does that plus fielding some amount of customer service, plus a lot of what upper management takes credit for.
The system is fucked, but we shouldn’t let the people doing barely anything to earn their yachts turn us against those grinding their own bones to glue the grind-house together.
(No, I’m not a middle-manager.)
I think my job is technically a middle manager at this point?
The reality is that the priorities come straight from the top, people in my team are mostly self-organised unless the tasks they choose were to be wildly misaligned with company milestones (which in practice never happens) or people have questions about what needs tackling first or when by, and I'm mostly a technical unblocker that jumps into the hardest or slowest moving technical challenges.
My point to all of this - "middle manager" is a wildly different concept in every company. Nobody likes a pen pusher with no knowledge, but also no company hires people into the title of "middle manager" hoping they'll boss people around cluelessly. If that happens and that role exists, something has gone clearly wrong IMO.
In thirty years as a programmer, I never had a manager who was capable of jumping into any technical challenges at all. For me, the best managers were the ones who kept out of my way and insulated me from their managers.
So hang on, did your managers not come from the same background? Did they promote people who couldn't do the job at the individual contributor level, or was it that they hired "career managers" whose only skill was to organise things?
I'm obviously not as skilled with coding anymore because even though I try to stay current with pet projects, the reality is that I don't have much time for that and there's no replacement for practice. But whenever there are technical challenges I've usually seen them before and can offer at least some guidance.
What does help is that I work in a system-wide role (you could call it systems engineering) and despite the management component of my role, my understanding of the interactions between components has gotten better over time, not worse.
I never once had a manager who even pretended to be a coder, and I've worked for a wide variety of companies ranging in size from a few people to tens of thousands. The only technical manager I've ever witnessed was myself when I managed teams of developers (and that only happened by accident when I wasn't really paying attention). Even then I was less of a technical manager and more of a lead developer who also took on management functions because there was nobody else around to do it.
It certainly seems like a manager with actual technical skills would make the best manager of a team of developers, as long as they also have the people skills to do it. And didn't harbor the desire to fire everybody and just do everything themselves - like I did.
My best manager was a former dentist who quit the profession after just two months because he couldn't stand the idea of sticking his hands in peoples' mouths all day long. I don't think he had anything resembling formal qualifications for management.