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Comment by gbalduzzi | Hacker News Reader

Well, being the middle man is kinda the manager job. The situation you describe happens when the manager does a poor job and is both submissive to the business requests and unable to comprehend technical issues.

Ideally having a competent person acting as the middle man for most daily operations is desirable though

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This is it. I have had a few really good managers in my career. They were game changers. When they came to me, they’d really done their homework and thought about the problem, or they hadn’t done it at all and were handing it off to me and giving me the contacts and support I needed to do my own research and own a thing entirely myself.

Outside of those managers, managers have been worse than useless. They’ve been an impediment to both me and the business (from what I can see).

So, in my experience, a good manager is worth every penny. All other managers are a net negative.

In a lot of organisations the business side isn't necessarily incentivised to talk to tech, which causes a lot of issues. In good places, it's different and the development cycles work really well with an engaged business side. You still might want some manager in there to manage demands, conflicts, resources, etc.

Agreed. There is a role for a good manager to filter ideas from the business side and make sure all asks are building towards the products future. If the funnel is "sales people => engineers" you're likely to get a lot of spurious development that doesn't make the product better.

Reminds me of the "if apple built every feature requested" meme.

https://twitter.com/blader/status/1698369360581337399/photo/...

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