Hacker News Reader

Comment by eCa | Hacker News Reader

> People often underestimate the difficulties of getting a hack to work and overestimate how long doing something correctly will take.

Yes. And sometimes one of those people is your boss.

View on HN

Most of the times, I would say. Perhaps the biggest tragedy of Software Development today is how few managers actually do/have done enough software development to qualify managing those who do.

Management has two goals: 1) Make themselves look like they contribute value: Micro-manage projects, track time spent, etc. Even if there's nothing achieved, they can claim to be doing something and organizing meetings. 2) Swap out programmers like cogs in a machine. 3) There is no incentive to have good quality code because chances are everybody will be off the project in a year or so, so you take credit for the success and place the failure on the poor SOBs who have to maintain the system.

i think you might be misunderstanding the point of managers..

True, but he does paint an interesting, if not accurate picture of a significant proportion of the managers out there.

Part of the job as a software engineer is to inform your manager as to the tradeoffs and the correct solution. Especially if well paid.

Surely, there are bosses who won't listen. But of the ones I've worked for, nearly all would listen to a reasonable explanation of how best to achieve the goals, and would approve recommendations from below.

If you've got a track record of being right, that helps a lot :-)

I agree. And the managers I've worked with: I'm glad they were there so that I personally didn't have to navigate the company hierarchy. But I strongly feel that the managers who were in the past good software developers have a much better idea of how to be managers...those who weren't, I've noticed a misplaced desire to prove themselves, which has hurt me personally.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com