The unspoken truth about managing geeks (2009)
computerworld.com
computerworld.com
In any technical team I've been part of, implicitly, respect and competence were far more relevant than organizational authority. Any technically competent person I've met, upon meeting a new lead or manager, will consciously or subconsciously evaluate "Does this person know their stuff?". If yes, they'll work for & with the lead. If not, they'll route around them - most IT Pros are surprisingly skilled at "Upward management".
However, what I also found is: geeks don’t care about the value they are creating/not creating all too often.
If you are on the “other side of the table tasked to extract value from an engineering/science team” the amount of disrespect that you are facing from geeks is sometimes almost unbearable.
As much as I hear things like “education or opinions do not matter - but facts and data and demonstrated competency” this only lasts as long as the people saying it feel it’s a waiver to demonstrate some “tolerance and openness as long as it means they got to do what they want”.
What a lot of geeks don’t understand: yes, management also figures out “who is more results and product driven” and will shy away giving the “most impactful tasks” to the condescending folks...
A lot of managers would enjoy their work more having a bit more technical expertise; but the same is true - and even more so - for geeks.
This is a two way street - mostly you don't actually want to hire someone who cares about the business, because they're not as easily exploited. I'm saying, yes, not caring about business value is a negative from one perspective, but culturally organizations have adapted to that and the person best suited to being plugged in to a position is someone who will work tirelessly on whatever you give them without caring one way or the other about the big picture. If they actually are interested in value, then they are going to be demotivated on a doomed or dysfunctional or immoral project.
If somebody is a kick-ass programmer AND understands what value he is adding - he will be very successful at the company I am working right now. If he disagrees with his manager AND is right even more so.
But the experience I made is that the “feedback and speaking” up is more driven by personal preference and “what do I want to work on” instead of business and customer need.
Well, I hesitate to call something "dysfunctional" if it works. It becomes a subjective value judgment.
Different companies have succeeded in different ways.
There is a reason why many super successful companies have values/culture: shift ownership and decision making as much to the people at the forefront as possible to avoid “managing them from the top”.
Empowering engineers and scientists to develop a sense and say in product priorities is great, extremely difficult but speaks for a company that values contributions beyond a “specialization/niche”
I spend inordinate amount of time trying to instill business sense into my team members; help them be aware of how their actions contribute to the good/bad/ugly outcomes; encourage both a sense of pride and responsibility; awareness of client priorities and position; etc.
At the end of the day, I'm responsible for achieving business objectives. If all my team is aware of them, then all my team can strive towards them individually and collectively - without constant micromanaging from myself or anybody else.
Now, different places work differently; but I've hated being treated as an "exchangeable resource" when I was a techie; I hate treating people as "exchangeable resources" now (or even calling them "resources":); and have explicitly taught project management intro class that in our culture we believe motivated, aware team members in good morale are for more productive.
>> best suited to being plugged in to a position is someone who will work tirelessly on whatever you give them without caring one way or the other about the big picture
Such a person would have to be monitored every second of their work to ensure they "work tirelessly" to something valuable and productive. Which means we now have 2+ people accomplishing the work of one - the "person working tirelessly" and the person "monitoring tirelessly".
I am deeply, profoundly sympathetic if you've worked most of your career in a place that built that kind of cynicism. Certainly, I've built my own share of cynicism - I've worked at large enterprises 90% of my career and it's fascinating at times to witness the startup-oriented zeitgeist of HN. But never quite at the level where I believe it's actually better that my colleagues or team members don't have / don't care about business outcomes, or that my management is seeking such employees :<
My post wasn't really prompted by my past employment nearly as much as my interviews and phone screens in the past couple of years. I'm inferring what the norm is based on what people seem to be looking for. Specifically, an interest in technology for its own sake.
"IT pros always and without fail, quietly self-organize around those who make the work easier, while shunning those who make the work harder, independent of the organizational chart."
People who don't IT are unable to contribute, don't understand business is now IT, and often sacrifice good for org for selfish gains.
People who do IT should contribute every day, need to learn the business domain every day and stop playing victim to random authority of the week.
I inferred OP essentially saying: business is IT. They're synonymous - and I'd largely agree with this.
All businesses deal with managing information, be it storing financial records, IP info, or transmitting data amongst users or employees. The I in IT is "Information", and all businesses deal with information/data.
Anyhow, the article starts out saying management often views geeks as being business challenged, which such a viewpoint is questionable given what IT is. Arguably, geeks are better at business (i.e. information handling and problem solving) than non-geeks. Hence, the point about respect in the article. IT Pro's won't simply respect someone because they're the boss. They respect those who are competent at solving business (IT) problems, regardless of demeanor or hierarchal rank.
As so, this bottom-up respect speaks volumes as to success of a team (as the lack of it indicates the leaders are charlatans).
> Arguably, geeks are better at business (i.e. information handling and problem solving) than non-geeks.
Do you believe there's something that geeks aren't better at than non-geeks (when it comes to being an employee)? Because OP's point, as I read it, was that geeks are superior and should be running everything and was incredibly dismissive of non-geeks being useful.
I agree that respect is earned, not given. But if you just immediately dismiss what someone has to say because they aren't part of your geek tribe, you are beginning the relationship from a hostile standpoint. Why would non-geeks look at this as anything other than geeks being antagonistic?
> Anyhow, the article starts out saying management often views geeks as being business challenged, which such a viewpoint is questionable given what IT is.
I read the article differently. It was much less about geeks being business challenged and much more about geeks being elitist, such as OP's bellicose comment.
If neither side is willing to work with the other side, the fault almost certainly lies with everyone.
I think the article could have been about anyone being elitist, it just so happens to be about IT teams. Just remove geeks and non-geeks out for a moment. Think the nature of hierarchy in general.
A stable hierarchy has the best people as its leaders, which is when society benefits the most and teams work together best. If however, the leaders are charlatans, then more competent underlings will stop respecting or listening to the leaders, and/or may challenge the leaders. Typically life is worse off (for society as a whole) under bad leaders than good leaders.
This is why bottom up respect speaks volume to the success of a team. The article speaks a bit on this in the section about respect, and suggests favoring competency as a solution.
Anyhow, I don't think OP's point necessarily is at odds with this as the 2nd poster pointed out. OP argues that IT folk act elitist, because perhaps they actually are but find themselves following “random authority figure of the week”, (rather than the best authority).
Whether or not that’s true is subject to debate. I’m sure it is in some cases and others not, but I largely agree with the part of his argument about business being largely synonymous with IT.
>Do you believe there's something that geeks aren't better at than non-geeks
Sure, everyone is flawed. No one is fully aware of everything. As so, some may need help with understanding the scope of things, other people’s viewpoints, and problems. Some may have trouble communicating novel ideas, or solutions, and need help in deploying them. Think people skills. I think this is why technical people say it’s helpful to have a manager who acts as a sounding board.
You are saying the usefulness of a manager is the same as, say, a stuffed octopus. I think this is illustrative of a cultural gap. Someone else might claim that all of the interesting and challenging problems in business are management problems that technical people as such don't even acknowledge.
A stuffed octopus is indeed something people (techies) use as a sounding board - and it works. You can explain your problems to anyone or anything and get surprisingly good results. I have used my manager this way. However, that's not the limit of what a manager can do.
I'm more interested in the argument itself, than not stepping on toes. As you see yourself, the slightest negative can be slightly turned into boogeymen or elite anyway.
So for free-thinking, bottom-up authority should be very interesting for modern forms of software development. People removed from dev and testing seem to forget or not know of the subtle intricacies involved, thus the best leaders are themselves involved in some of the gritty work, even just for temporary relief. What we see today is adding more and more layers of people who just are ignorant, playing political games and not contributing to end results. Then they wonder why the peons can't "scale" to their "Agile processes"!
So for those interested in the arguments themselves, I'll leave it open (you can of course find contradictory examples as well). It's a bit funny though frustrating at times, because when you've been on "all" sides, you cease to see the little fences people put around themselves and their pet pens..
I'll actually make a claim here: Over time, no.
We've got to get away from this myth that learning a programming language makes you forever forget how to shower, makes you unpleasant, ignorant of the customer, etc.
Now, that may actually happen to devs, but this is a) a not-unforeseeable consequence, and b) avoidable/fixable over time.
What is not avoidable is that people who don't know how to program, and how software works, still don't know how to program, and end up making decisions while blind.
This is an invisible problem, that customers, sales managers, and shareholders never see directly, but it manifests in unrealistic expectations being set, crunch time, and missed deadlines. Or sometimes they do see it---my brother is sole data scientist at a small company, and is regularly astonished at how little reps of the latest ML-in-a-box seem to know about what they're trying to sell him.
There are unreasonable programmers, I don't mean to say there aren't. However, that can be fixed without making them forget how to program. Meanwhile, the process for helping a non-technical employee understand the rest of the business...probably involves having them be a line engineer for a few weeks, i. e. the most straightforward way to solve the problems associated with non-technical stakeholders is to make them technical.
This wasn't even implied, and seems like a projection of your internal biases.
My point was geeks are good at some things, and bad at others. Nobody is better at everything, and that is a profoundly arrogant stance to take.
> What is not avoidable is that people who don't know how to program, and how software works, still don't know how to program, and end up making decisions while blind.
Sure, and most geeks have never made a sale in their life. Most geeks have never raised VC capital before. Most geeks have never had to make a presentation to shareholders before.
Geeks have their strengths and weaknesses just like everybody else. However this "us vs them" mentality is just a setup for disaster. Sure, it would be better if more people had the knowledge to code like geeks as that lends them more perspective. Likewise, it would be better if more geeks had the knowledge to do sales, create partnerships, and everything else useful for running a business as it would lend them more perspective. But people can only do so many things with the hours in a day, which is why people specialize and collaborate.
The obvious superficial example to bolster my argument is to look at the clusterfuck of product launches at Google, a fundamentally engineering-first company. They're the laughing stock even amongst geeks here on HN.
What makes a geek? Is it knowing how to program? If you take your average sales guy and teach them js, do they suddenly become a "geek"?
If by "geek" we mean "bad at sales," then yeah, no shit they have weaknesses, it's tautological. If we mean "is technically competent," would making a non-competent person competent suddenly make them a "geek" and now subject to a bunch of new weaknesses?
Actually, as measured, I think it would, just like someone could no longer eat mystery meat with the same gusto if they knew what went into it.
In my intent, there's nothing wrong with the business "side" (except that there are "sides"!). Though you can't do business today and expect, even demand, to stay ignorant of technology. Staying ignorant is a choice that shouldn't be part of important decisionmaking.
Likewise, geeks should go out more, get laid, jk. This is a forever problem, but somehow the organization should make it easy for people to hash things out on a whiteboard together. This need better collaborative environments than what enterpricey corps manage today. They're great at producing hostages though!
Article was a bit TL;DR and didn't bring much to the table other than trying to whitewash geeks, as if that's required now? Just a symptom of the above. In my experience, you can generalize the same way for every important function, but ain't a constructive path at all.
What shouldn't be acceptable anymore is: "This isn't my domain since it's technical [about business critical IT systems]" (and ofc vica versa), yet seems every function is now hell-bent on digging their heels in within "their" part of the dinosaur.