Yeah, my experience suggests the same. I also had a few good managers… which only made the incompetence of the rest of them more obvious.
Another difference between programmers and managers is that programmers are usually in a flat structure (for example a team with three to seven developers), while managers are in a hierarchy (managers of managers of managers). That means, if one programmer clearly sucks, there are colleagues who can say that openly, and if you assign tasks to them, you will see which ones complete their tasks quickly, and which ones virtually never. That is a feedback mechanism. On the other hand, even if you have a good manager, but his boss is a bad one, well, the job of the good one is to obey the bad one, so there is a limit to what he can do right. You only get a good outcome when the entire chain is good, or when the lower managers are very good at shielding you from what happens above them (which is not always possible).
Who decides what ratio of managers to developers is ideal for a software development company? That’s right, the managers! So you get companies that seem to have more managers than developers, the developers are overworked, but there is not enough money in the budget left to hire more developers. Meanwhile, the managers organize more and more meetings, to create work for themselves. (There are dozens of people in a meeting, even if most of them only say a sentence or two. No one writes meeting minutes. Many meetings repeat periodically and a large part of them consists of repeating what was told the last time.)
the result of schmoozing, of personal biases and preferences, of prejudices, who’s whose friend or in extreme cases who fucks who.
Yes to all of these points. It is so weird when your boss gets a new boss who talks about his hobby… and suddenly you boss has the same hobby, too. What a coincidence! Or when your IT company is 100% male, and no one seems gay, so you think “okay, this company is an exception, I see no way how sex could play a role here”, and then you find out that this guys fucks that guy’s sister, etc., and the entire management is practically one big happy family.
One more thing to add:
Developers are often blamed for optimizing for their career over what’s best for the company. For example, the developers sometimes insist that the new project try this new shiny technology, regardless of whether that is necessary or not, just because “worked with new technology X” will look great on their CV. Yes, that happens. And guess what… managers play the same game! Sometimes good projects get decommissioned and replaced by new ones not because there was anything wrong with the old project, but because “created a new project” sounds better on the manager’s CV than “maintained a project created by my predecessor”.
Since we’re speculating about programmer culture I’ll bring up the jargon file which describes some hacklish jargon from the early days of computer hobbyists. I think it’s safe to say these kinds of people do not in general like beauty and elegance of computer systems sacrificed for “business interests”, whether or not that includes a political counter cultural attitude.
It could be a lot of programmer disdain for “suits” is traced back to those days, but I’m honestly not sure how niche that culture has become in eternal september. For more context see “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution” or anything else written by Steven Levy.
but I’m honestly not sure how niche that culture has become in eternal september.
Long gone, I am afraid.
It seems to me that greatest difference is that a few decades ago, the only people who studied computers were math nerds. Then at some moment, computers became a reliable way to make a great salary, and everyone started paying attention… but of course it takes a few years to learn programming (and more years until the school systems wake up and start teaching it), so the first generation of well paid programmers were the nerds who originally learned it for Platonic reasons.
The next generation of programmers, however, consists mostly of people who are there only for the money. Many of them do not even like programming, it’s just that they need to do something to pay their bills. And yeah, the nerds are there too, but now they are a minority, and their preferences are considered irrelevant.
I mean, obviously there’s some of that, but even if you have a high tolerance for necessary ugliness, bad management in tech has so much more to it. Honestly just the whole Agile/Scrum thing and the absolute nonsense it has devolved into would be enough to make most sane human beings hate the guts of anyone who keeps imposing it on them (all the more if that other person then contributes no measurable good to the rest of their day).
Yeah, my experience suggests the same. I also had a few good managers… which only made the incompetence of the rest of them more obvious.
Another difference between programmers and managers is that programmers are usually in a flat structure (for example a team with three to seven developers), while managers are in a hierarchy (managers of managers of managers). That means, if one programmer clearly sucks, there are colleagues who can say that openly, and if you assign tasks to them, you will see which ones complete their tasks quickly, and which ones virtually never. That is a feedback mechanism. On the other hand, even if you have a good manager, but his boss is a bad one, well, the job of the good one is to obey the bad one, so there is a limit to what he can do right. You only get a good outcome when the entire chain is good, or when the lower managers are very good at shielding you from what happens above them (which is not always possible).
Who decides what ratio of managers to developers is ideal for a software development company? That’s right, the managers! So you get companies that seem to have more managers than developers, the developers are overworked, but there is not enough money in the budget left to hire more developers. Meanwhile, the managers organize more and more meetings, to create work for themselves. (There are dozens of people in a meeting, even if most of them only say a sentence or two. No one writes meeting minutes. Many meetings repeat periodically and a large part of them consists of repeating what was told the last time.)
Yes to all of these points. It is so weird when your boss gets a new boss who talks about his hobby… and suddenly you boss has the same hobby, too. What a coincidence! Or when your IT company is 100% male, and no one seems gay, so you think “okay, this company is an exception, I see no way how sex could play a role here”, and then you find out that this guys fucks that guy’s sister, etc., and the entire management is practically one big happy family.
One more thing to add:
Developers are often blamed for optimizing for their career over what’s best for the company. For example, the developers sometimes insist that the new project try this new shiny technology, regardless of whether that is necessary or not, just because “worked with new technology X” will look great on their CV. Yes, that happens. And guess what… managers play the same game! Sometimes good projects get decommissioned and replaced by new ones not because there was anything wrong with the old project, but because “created a new project” sounds better on the manager’s CV than “maintained a project created by my predecessor”.
Since we’re speculating about programmer culture I’ll bring up the jargon file which describes some hacklish jargon from the early days of computer hobbyists. I think it’s safe to say these kinds of people do not in general like beauty and elegance of computer systems sacrificed for “business interests”, whether or not that includes a political counter cultural attitude.
It could be a lot of programmer disdain for “suits” is traced back to those days, but I’m honestly not sure how niche that culture has become in eternal september. For more context see “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution” or anything else written by Steven Levy.
Long gone, I am afraid.
It seems to me that greatest difference is that a few decades ago, the only people who studied computers were math nerds. Then at some moment, computers became a reliable way to make a great salary, and everyone started paying attention… but of course it takes a few years to learn programming (and more years until the school systems wake up and start teaching it), so the first generation of well paid programmers were the nerds who originally learned it for Platonic reasons.
The next generation of programmers, however, consists mostly of people who are there only for the money. Many of them do not even like programming, it’s just that they need to do something to pay their bills. And yeah, the nerds are there too, but now they are a minority, and their preferences are considered irrelevant.
I mean, obviously there’s some of that, but even if you have a high tolerance for necessary ugliness, bad management in tech has so much more to it. Honestly just the whole Agile/Scrum thing and the absolute nonsense it has devolved into would be enough to make most sane human beings hate the guts of anyone who keeps imposing it on them (all the more if that other person then contributes no measurable good to the rest of their day).