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Comment by chrislomax | Hacker News Reader

Do you really work at a place where everything is so impersonable that it is all referenced by project number or was that used to obfuscate your clients in this example?

None of the comments surprise me to be honest, I find that managers have come from no background to instruct people on a technological level and are taken on for simply their management ability.

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Referencing things by number is pretty common, I think, a lot of places use a Jira system where each ticket has a number and its often used for all development related tasks.

Our projects do carry a reference, it is usually prefixed by the department handling it and a number but when we have production meetings they are all referenced by the client and the job in hand.

I don't think I would like to work at a company where it was just a number, I like it being personal, it would feel more like a machine with just numbers or references

yeah, I agree its a bit weird, at the company I work for people usually just resort to describing the issue when talking about it (when not in front of a computer), rather than reference the number, but jira ticket numbers are frequently passed back and worth to refer to specific tasks.

You are working at the wrong company. Quit.

EDIT: "I find that managers have come from no background to instruct people on a technological level and are taken on for simply their management ability."

If true, that is a sign of a very unhealthy company.

It's a tradeoff. Some of my worst managers were former programmers; some of my best came in through some side door. Management ability--real management, as in getting people to get along and get the job done, not as in making Gantt charts and chanting buzzwords--is essential, and it's really rare to find it combined with technical skills.

It's not rare in the Silicon Valley. Most managers in successful companies here are what you'd consider rare. Managers without real management ability don't last long here.

And are they also good engineers? That's the hard part; the kind of obsessive focus usually required to be a good geek tends to impair the social skills required to be a good manager. Not always, I admit, but usually.

I did work in Silicon Valley, but not for very long; and it was in the late 90s, at Netscape, so my experience was probably atypical.

All great engineering managers I know were also great engineers. It's possible to use your geek focus to improve your social skills, I've done it :)

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