Tech by PC

Saw this fire your boss article over on PBS. It looks like it got slashdotted as well and probably has been discussed to death there. One thing I’m quite glad for in my current job is a good chain of command that understands IT – especially my more immediate ones, and I can’t say one way or the other for many of the ones at other locations because I don’t know them well enough.

I remember working for a manager at a previous company that didn’t have any IT experience at all. In fact she was just a plain manager. Their philosophy was that a person didn’t have to know the field to manage it. To some extent I believe that is true. If your manager is really good (she was) they will be able to foster a team environment to make decisions even amidst IT people who can have thick heads when it comes to picking someone else’s decision over their own. Because of this I disagree with the premise that a manager should know how to code. After all, not every IT department codes, and not every coder deals with C, PHP, and MySQL all at the same time, or at all. In fact, having a manager that is technical can be detrimental if that manager feels his ideas are more important than those under him.

My immediate boss had the same position as I did up until a year and a half ago or so. He is senior to me by about a year with the company, really knows his stuff, and is willing to put in whatever amount of time it takes to get the job done. I remember once printing out a timesheet for him when we were on the same level because he just wanted to go home. My memory tells me it was over 90 hours for the week. It was a bad week though as I remember having fewer than 10 hours less than him. While that week might have been a fluke, his average is higher than mine and I’m no slacker, but I do have kids. Back to the story though – he has worked the trenches and knows how things go, and even though we disagree on things, we always seem to work things out the right way in the end.

His boss, who used to be the person I reported to before they created the intermediate position, also rose up from the trenches. In fact, when I first started working there about five years ago he was still working the trenches even though he was my boss. Like the article mentions, he does know coding and SQL and can still write queries. He likes to tell us that he’s become technically dumb since moving into a director position and taking his hands off the trench work, but I know better. He could pick it all back up in a heartbeat if he wanted to or had to.

Now I’m not writing this for them because I’m sure they don’t read this. In fact, I’m almost positive that no one I know reads what I write online except for my wife. I’m writing this for myself because things could be a lot worse somewhere else. I’ve been fortunate to have either excellent managers or qualified technical bosses throughout most of my career. There is a downside to that, however – when the people above you are so qualified, it makes moving up all the more difficult. I finished my MBA a little over a year ago and took the MBA over a technical degree because, as I tell people all the time, the technical stuff comes very naturally to me. I don’t need an instructor telling me how to do something new that is technical when I could just pick up a book or dive into it and learn much more quickly, and I don’t need a degree to prove that I’m qualified technically. On the other hand, management is not quite as natural to me. I believe that I would make a good manager based on my schooling, time in the military, and time managing projects since the beginning of my career. Again, the problem is that when you have such good people above you that you limit your chances to move up.

I get what the article is trying to say, and I believe that a technical manager can lack a good deal of management savvy and still do a good job if they are well qualified technically. However, I disagree with it in that I believe a manager who is not technical, but is an excellent manager, can do a good job leading an IT department. Teamwork is the key to large projects, and if that non-technical manager can get enough technical people working together as a team he or she can accomplish any project regardless of qualifications beyond management.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 14th, 2008 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Soapbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.