Comment by steve8918 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steve8918 | Hacker News Reader

I was in a medium-sized company where the VP of Engineering started attending design meetings. Talk about a huge waste of time and a huge distraction.

Because he was the VP, and kind of jerk at that, everyone acted differently in the design meetings but everyone felt compelled to answer his questions because he was the VP. He would ask obvious questions that would derail the entire process. It was completely unproductive, but he really felt he could "add value" by attending the meetings, but it was pretty obvious that his expiration date as a technical person was long gone.

There was a funny quote a few weeks ago about how Zuckerberg wanted to go in and fix a few bugs and developers were complaining because he was way slower, etc, and basically just interfered with the process.

I'm glad that the original author is interested in learning how to program, but if it means he's going to stick his nose in and start gumming up the system, then he should stop. Programmers require a certain personality type. You can't take someone in sales and think that by understanding programming that it will somehow help him. Leave the managing to the managers, leave the sales to the sales people, and leave the programming to the programmers.

There was a funny quote a few weeks ago about how Zuckerberg wanted to go in and fix a few bugs and developers were complaining because he was way slower, etc, and basically just interfered with the process.

Zuckerberg is a college drop out that started Facebook. We don't really know how his skills compares to others. It's easy to assume he his above average, but I have no idea what kind of code was behind the earlier Facebook versions.

My guess is that the Facebook that Zuckerberg started is so "simple" compared to the current version that it requires a different skill set. "Anyone" can throw together some some php+sql code to make Facebook v1.0, but that doesn't mean that they are actually an above average programmer. I'm not saying that he couldn't be an excellent programmer, but he has probably lost a lot of programming hours compared to others that were at his college at the time

Bill Gates may have inspired more cred during the early days. There are some hints about from history regarding his grip on things.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting and taking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_55 ;-).

What you say makes sense. But if someone were to learn a little math and then proceed to tell mathematicians how to solve theorems they would be labelled a crackpot.

A person who cannot enrich themselves by learning programming in order to better able communicate their ideas without tempering it with humility and awareness of the vast size of the subject has problems that "learning" to program only made more clear. Like violence and videogames.

Indeed I would argue that they did not learn to program for communication or enrichment purposes. Great Insecurity and megalomania come to mind. That person in a more perfect word should not be leading you.

I have a similar story except that the executive is the founder and created the original web site over a decade ago. Now, he's not a bad programmer but he's not really a good one either, where he excels are ideas and architecture.

We had been working for months on moving the site to a more modern platform (RoR) when he called us into a room and told us that we were going to move to PHP and Java. Everyone just looked at him like he had just sprouted a second head.

Sometimes its bad for executives to learn programming. :(

Seems like he's in it or the right reasons, but possibly too late.

At the very least he'll become more efficient communicating with his dev team & management than before.

There's two problems here: one, that Zuckerberg is joining a project, which by itself usually delays it. Two, he's probably rusty.

I hope he gets to see your comment b/c its not something that would get mentioned by his coders. So do you feel like its a good idea on paper for managers to know the nature of the programmers work that well?

A good manager should be technical so that you can engage him in a very technical conversation and he should be able to follow along. But I don't think you specifically need to be a coder to do that, I've seen other good managers come from non-programming backgrounds.

That being said, my best manager was a former coder-turned-manager. When he was coding, he wasn't the most brilliant coder in the group, but neither am I. He knew about the coding process and how long things take, etc, so that was genuinely helpful.

But what made him my best manager was because he knew how to keep us shielded from the BS from customers and upper management, and he genuinely cared about our professional and personal development. This garnered a great deal of loyalty from me and my other coworkers, so he was able to get a lot of good work from us in the years that I was with him.

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