Comment by UweSchmidt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by UweSchmidt | Hacker News Reader

It appears that outside our bubble software-work enjoys such a low status that management does not possess, or admits to possessing, any technical competence. This is in stark contrast to engineering or manufacturing companies, where engineers make up the highest levels of management and also adjacent areas like running the factories, and generally management prides itself with being hands-on, dropping knowledge and walking through the shop floor frequently.

In an agile environment (the most common structure in software development) the professional class of scrum masters and analysts are often non-technical, and management is sparse and hands-off (teams are "self-organized"). Key technical decisions are relegated to senior individual contributors, allowing for CV driven development, cargo culting, and bad habits. Stories of a Microsoft VP who files a bug report and points out the line of code where the error occured could never have happened anywhere where I worked.

I think modern software companies moves to remove roles like scrum masters, testers and analysts. My theory here is that e.g scrum masters wants to scrum, it’s their job. Much better to have the team take turn being the scrum master. They own the process and the pain.

The non technical scrum master fills a very important role for higher management: somebody to take blame and responsibility.

I've never seen this, I've seen them be some kind of project manager role or just bubbly people who say some BS and convince company to pay them to waste employees time.

In my company, the project manager is essentially just there to report progress to management.

Why is it necessary to report progress to management? I'm not sure; as far as I've seen, nothing is ever done with the information, except to propagate it further up the chain. I can only speculate that, without progress reporting, management would seem to have too little work to do to justify its headcount.

If you don’t known what is done with reports on progress, you probably shouldn’t comment on such things and should instead go find out.

Usually what is done with that information is scheduling or sales. Typically overly optimistic scheduling or selling a thing one does not possess (a future).

In my experience the role of non technical managers is to assign blame to the technical staff.

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