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Comment by Kaveren | Hacker News Reader

Yes, always. A minister of a diplomatic department should have diplomacy experience. A minister of a justice department should have justice experience. Anything else is ludicrous.

> "But Mr Sakurada responded that other officials had the necessary experience and he was confident there would not be a problem."

Then why is he the one taking the job?

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> Anything else is ludicrous.

Usually, ministry posting is about politics, not competency: a minister post would be proposed to political allies in exchange for support during the campaign. It's how, in France, we ended up with Taubira as minister of justice (here called "guarde des sceaux") under president Hollande, in exchange for the support of her radical left party during the 2012 elections. And she was mostly incompetent in that role, since she had no prior qualification, other than being a politician.

So you're saying politics in France are ludicrous?

Yes. I used that example because of how it's clear example of a political nomination.

A minister is a manager. We don't expect our managers to be good at programming, because that's what they hired us for. I expect them to be good at managing their ministry and relegating to their subject knowledge and specific members' experiences on subject matter.

Actually, I do expect my manager to be good at programming. How could he reasonably manage me otherwise?

So far I haven't been disappointed.

I suspect you will continue to be disappointed with that expectation. Management of resources, motivating employees, and political savvy are all very distinct skills from writing code.

"motivating employees"

I don't think it's possible to motivate somebody in a discipline that you have never tried. If anything, it is hugely demotivational.

It reminds me of a dialogue I had once with a manager of technical writers. She said that she wanted to be a manager because she was bored as a technical writer, in order to motivate people. Really? She couldn't even motivate herself to stay!

So, feel free to claim that managers need different skills. But to motivate people, who can do something you don't know or don't like? Don't kid yourself, please.

He states that he isn't disappointed so far.

Same for me, all my managers so far have had engineering knowledge or held computer science degrees. It's not always been pure coding, but at least compsci.

A minister isn't a pure people manager though. They also make important decisions. And how are they supposed to know which of their staff to delegate to if they have no subject area expertise?

I think there’s a delta between “good at X” and “reasonably familiar with and knowledgeable about X.” If you know nothing about X, you can’t speak the same language as the people you’re managing, nor understand the issues they’re tackling, reasonable priorities, reasonable obstacles, etc.

You don’t have to be an excellent pulmonologist to manage pulmonologists, but if you have no experience in healthcare, you’re going to make terrible decisions. You won’t know what’s realistic and what isn’t.

But a Scrum master can do scrums without knowing anything detailed about the project.

I was for a project ( some backend server stuff ) in a company. The scrum master was a former gardner who did a scrum course. He was good, could solve a lot of issues and keep us on track. But he had no idea of the technologies and IT in general.

> But he had no idea of the technologies and IT in general.

Leaders must have the respect of the team in order to be effective. With no knowledge or experience, earning this respect from the team is a tall order.

I think that this a question of basic computer literacy, and not expertise in technology.

Right? If anything someone in this position needs basic familiarity to avoid social engineering, reminds me of a scene in Hackers:

Security guard answers phone: Security, uh Norm, Norm speaking.

Date: Norman? This is Mr. Eddie Vedder, from accounting. I just had a power surge here at home that wiped out a file I was working on. Listen, I'm in big trouble, do you know anything about computers?

Norm: Uhhmmm... uh gee, uh...

Dade: Right, well my BLT drive on my computer just went AWOL, and I've got this big project due tomorrow for Mr. Kawasaki, and if I don't get it in, he's gonna ask me to commit Hari Kari...

Dade proceeds to get Norm to read him the number off of a modem at the TV station

One can argue that it is possible to successfully delegate what one cannot understand. But organizations in which managers have an understanding of the problem they are delegating are always going to have an advantage over organizations with managers who do not.

This is just a bad idea. It's a pretty massive part of what's mostly wrong in the world today. The idea that people who are functionally incompetent should be managing people who are is just pretty fucked in the head.

You don't need to be expert, but at least be related to the thing you head... Would it be ok for minister of finance to say "Never went to a bank, never had an account. I have staff and secretaries they somehow get me things I want"?

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