I think the fear/hatred he describes among techies for non-technical managers is overall pretty reasonable.

A lot of managers believe their job is to make decisions, and a lot of employees even encourage that. But technology decisions often have subtle, far-reaching implications. So when managers make decisions they shouldn't (e.g., picking a toolset, or outsourcing a project, or simultaneously fixing resources, scope and schedule), they end up thoroughly screwing the developers involved. But if none of the other managers understand the tech either, then managers can happily blame the devs. Hands up everybody who has seen that?

Software is almost unique, in that it's a collective intellectual work that is expected to function and grow and change over many years. The only close equivalent I can think of is legal code, but I think software is worse in that legal code is made to be interpreted by humans.

The only non-technical managers I've had that I didn't at least briefly consider murdering were the ones who, like Rand Fishkin, were comfortable admitting ignorance. That let them leave technical decisions to the techies.

>(e.g., picking a toolset, or outsourcing a project, or simultaneously fixing resources, scope and schedule)

My company had non-developers make these decisions and we paid the price. We were an org of PHP and Python developers "forced" to switch to C#/.NET (At the request of two technical-ish, but non-developer VPs) It really sucked because the teams expert knowledge got wiped to zero and we had to spend several months learning new tools while also keeping our original deadlines. At the time, I jumped at the opportunity to explore something new. Ultimately however, it was bad business and continues to cost the company money as nothing we were doing received any direct or indirect benefit from being done in .NET. The only difference was we worked slower and produced more defects.

I have to disagree on your implication that non-technical managers should be distrusted. I have had both technical and non-technical managers that have made my life difficult. I've also has both that have made my life easier.

A manager's job is to make sure his/her employees have the facilities that they need to get their jobs done. They shelter employees from political bullshit, provide them resources, and enable them to make the decisions they need to make. When necessary, they also facilitate/broker conversations where wrinkles need to be ironed out.

A very large problem I've seen with technical managers is there are those that think they know everything and need to provide technical input (or insist on actually coding). More often than not, they think they know more than they actually do (and often refuse to acknowledge their weaknesses). This has provided me more headaches than non-technical managers not understanding what I am working on...

For myself, I've been in a number of senior roles in the past several years, I have my opinions based on knowledge and experience, but I know my limits. I try and encourage those around me to be open about their thoughts/challenges. I would rather take the time (bounded) pursuing a dead-end that someone else (less experienced) proposes, if it seems reasonable, than denying the investigation if I had an opinion based on stories/limited experience.

In general, I always learn from listening to others -- more or less experienced. A good manager will do the same, listen to his/her team, and facilitate their input/and growth.

I was right with you until the last paragraph.

I'm constantly telling a good friend of mine who is a co-founder of a start-up NOT to learn to code. He's absolutely brilliant in his field (a technical but non-CS field) and while he wishes he could code up his ideas I've directed him to developing flowcharts and spending time writing - his ability to think up new ways of doing things within his field is unparalleled. Personally I think he's a genius at what he does and I see that when he tried to code he stops focusing on what he does best. Even though he understand enough core computing concepts to design applications I think he's jealous of my ability to mock up a demo app, while maybe I'm just clever enough to not go down the rabbit hole of trying to learn everything about everything..

His burning curiosity may help explain his genius.

What's the name of the startup? It sounds very cool.

Stealth mode right now, it's a niche market but lots of fun.

Congrats! Sometimes it sounds like having fun is half the battle. (Pardon the war metaphor.)

I suspect that the main reason for attitudes towards non-technical people is due to a wide distrust of "business type" guys. I think coders often have a great amount of respect for product designers, UI/UX folks making wireframes, .. or anyone who shows some capacity to actually make something, for deep thought & creativity, or to articulate a convincing & unique vision.

The greater myth is that "technical" people must lack "soft" skills. If you go beyond anecdotes, software engineers on the whole are more likely to be married & enjoy happy marriages, less likely to get divorced, have long lasting friendships, communicate honestly & care about others, are more likely to be engaged in politics and charities, etc. etc.

Likewise, engineering & building large software systems together (or any machine of complexity...), requires a great degree of communication & cooperation, thus it is no surprise that software engineers on the whole are actually pretty engaging people & have good communication skills.

Not that I think you're wrong, but do you have a citation for your second paragraph?

Also, is that compared to other professional fields, or the general population? The latter wouldn't be very remarkable.

I think the main crux of the article is ultimately dependent on the one thing he mentions at the very end:

  It goes (almost) without saying that the only reason I can
  afford to be non-technical is because I’m surrounded by a
  bunch of geniuses.

His points are valid, but if you're a single non-technical founder, it can often be hard to even know whom to surround yourself with if you lack the ability to evaluate them in the first place. This point is not made very apparent in the article.

Yes, non technical people can lead technical people successful - but I think they are the exceptions on the rule.

As the leader you are responsible for the results of the project - and if you don't understand the technology, you don't understand the risks of the technology. If you don't have an A+ team, they might be doing the wrong things and you wouldn't know. I'm talking about bad architecture, bad technology choices, full dependence on one developer,..

There is another side to the story - the worst managers I have had throughout my career have all been former programmers. Leadership and managerial skills plus an analytical orientation trump a coding background or specific technology skills to me.

Strong article. I think fear of technical ignorance is scar tissue. It's an overcompensation of the fact that traditionally programmers were undervalued until silicon valley proved that software does matter and is in fact a place where talent and decision-making power are incredibly important.

But in the end, technical knowledge is just one pillar. You also need strategy, management and ops to build a successful company. Rarely can one person bring all these to the table, instead you put together the right team of founders and employees to cover the essential skills. As long as you have a strong tech team whose knowledge and wisdom is feeding into the core of your decision making process then I think a CEO with more hard business experience is probably an advantage. It depends a lot on the company though.

The article makes a great point, it's not necessary to be technical to be successful in technology management. Also you should be proud of your strengths and the contributions they enable you to make rather than focus on power psychology.

I would also agree with the author that a technical background helps.

It seems to me that without a technical background it's possible to make an incorrect appraisal about problems with tecnical projects.

For example, the product is incorrect or late. Why?

As a manager you need to determine a belief on why things are problematic and how they can be improved.

There are a lot of possible problems. If a non-technical person gets this incorrect it can have very negative consequences. It's a minefield that is typically, though not always, better traversed by people with technical skills.

Well, come on. The basics are not that difficult. If you just attended the first 1-2 lectures of a CS 101 class, you wouldn't be talking about "the ability to call variables via programmatic statements". Plus, I'm sure any of your developers would be happy to spend a couple of hours and get you up to speed on the difference between variables and function calls.

Technical skills as a founder aren't important because you can build the product youself, but because they enable you find the best people who can.

I don't think you have either: a) read the article, or b) the first clue of what's going on inside Google.

Rand is not a moron, nor is he advocating management by morons. He's not an MBA either; he's a self-taught college dropout. He's saying that company founders who are nontechnical should be humble but not ashamed.

Google may have faults, but hiring MBAs to manage engineers is certainly not one of them. The engineering management hierarchy is almost exclusively extremely technical.

Everybody I know there in Google confirms that MBAs are really crippling it. Recently I had a lengthy discussion with couple of them on that. They do have politics and chaos.

Self-taught and nontechnical are two different terms. In real world scenario, self-taught people often associate themselves with "technical".

Rand appears to be, or at least to have become, a domain expert in SEO. I think devs, at least those not working on the latest social mobile local photo coupon sharing, tend to be respectful of domain experts. I think non-technical people seems to often be used to mean people without technical expertise or deep domain knowledge.

That's right. I respect ALL competence.

What I don't like is to be bossed around by puffy people with ZERO self-insight and INFINITE delusion.

> If a technical guy can read Steve Blank,Clayton Christensen,Hayek and Friedman....a non-techie can definitely read The Art of Computer Programming

What utter nonsense. The theoretical difficulty of pop-economics books like Hayek's Economics In One Lesson or The Road to Serfdom is less than Teach Yourself Programming In 24 Hours. That's not meant as a slight on any of those books or their authors, but your comparison is so inapt it beggars belief. The mathematical prerequisites alone for reading TAOCP are so significant that Knuth had to write an advanced undergraduate and graduate-level textbook (Concrete Mathematics) to equip students with even a small subset of the tools required.

> Hayek's Economics In One Lesson

s/Hayek/Hazlitt/

Kummon....its not that hard!...a sufficiently motivated person can definitely read and finish it....but yes maybe I should have taken an easier example.

Disagree?...Would love to know why!

Nice try, Hermain Cain.