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Comment by kaspm | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, as a manager, I try very hard to do as much of the grunt work as possible and the devs do more feature coding. Out of curiosity, where do you rank data modeling?

I tend to want to either design or review all data design, either relational or other, partly because of my background in data engineering and partly because I have business awareness that the devs don't have. It's just not possible to convey every nuance of a constantly evolving business to each dev on the team without it being distracting.

How would you like your manager to handle being involved in data modeling? Develop a spec and then review? pair modeling?

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Maybe data modeling is something that's officially a "manager-level task" at your company, so it's something you have to be involved in. But I would try to err on the side of delegating too much, rather than too little. If you have knowledge in a certain area that gives you special insight into how to improve implementation of code, I would challenge you to try to disseminate that amongst your team and hold them accountable for following it themselves, rather than setting yourself up as a gatekeeper.

All this assumes you trust your team to be thoughtful and do good work. If not then that's a whole 'nother issue.

Thanks that's helpful!

> How would you like your manager to handle being involved in data modeling?

When it comes to business-domain concepts, like "what is a project" or "what subtypes of customers do we have", that's stuff where I feel a manager should be helping to involve more people.

I'm speaking from the perspective of working on a business' proprietary ERP system, and it feels like nobody really knows how the business "ought" to work, they just follow the traditions enshrined in the code and then ask for their itches to be scratched.

I think that is true in a lot of cases, especially in business process engineering. It's a blessing when you work with a really good business process engineer!

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