> Managers don’t really know what we do
That looks a lot like incompetent management.
That looks a lot like incompetent management.
My point is that particularly in the UK we have this culture that the Geeks should just do their job and let us Business Types take care of the rest. Countries like Germany have a much higher respect of technical people and qualifications e.g. it's very common for CEO's to have PhDs
In software, it’s the same. Your employer hires you because they need an expert. It’s your job to take responsibility for the software you write. Even if the CEO has a PhD, it’s not the job of senior management to review your code. And - trust me - they don’t want to. Instead take responsibility for your own work. You are worth your paycheck because you know how to build software well. Stop trying to shirk your job.
Most companies nowadays are more like restaurant owners i.e. computers are a core part of their business. They can't and shouldn't rely on engineers to get things right all the time because humans are flawed and therefore their code will be. The CEO has the responsibility to put people and systems in place to account for this.
Of course, if the CEO defunds their infosec teams, they bear the blame when they get data breaches. But I also don't think the engineers on the ground get to avoid blame when their crappy software leaks customer data. "I thought about making it secure but we had a deadline so I didn't" is a lazy excuse. Blaming management for everything is a lazy excuse. We're engineers. Not typists.
To continue the restaurant analogy, if customers are consistently getting food poisoning due to the sloppy hygiene of the kitchens then the buck stops with the restaurant owner. They'd need to diagnose the issue, put in place better training and supervision of the cooks and have systems to regularly check that standards are being met
The title of a singular "glitch" is very misleading in this case, as this was a cacophony of cock-ups and cover-ups for 20+ years
Also, a good manager should detect if a team contains a few "dead weights". It eventually always lead to frustration from more competent team members and this is something that can be detected and addressed if you talk to your team members.
The only thing that may be difficult for managers in the public sector is firing people unless they are contractors. I don't know how it works in the UK but I have worked in gov agencies in another european country and firing someone who was just working badly (to the point of wasting time and energy of others) was almost impossible. And sometimes upper management would throw unfit people in your team just because they needed to put them somewhere. I had a few time wasters in some of my team that had been put in our team by the unemployment agency. Basically they had spent money on them taking "classes" (which were just Microsoft certification classes) and threw them at us while most of them weren't even interested to begin with. You really had to do direct fault to be fired and it would take months or even years. The only one I have seen being fired was a project manager who booked fake meetings to go play golf during office hours.
A manager that has no technical knowledge is useless, like a jockey who doesn't see a difference between a poney and a horse or distinguish a healthy horse from an injured one.
Thats taking it way too far. Sure; its useful for managers to understand programming concepts (deployment, testing, etc). But the job of a good manager isn't managing code. Its managing people. Making sure Sally is happy in her new role. Setting up a meeting between Jake and the sales team so they can get to the bottom of that important bug. Helping mediate that conflict between the software team and the design team over what features to prioritise.
A manager is hired to be an expert at humans. Not an expert at computers.