Management aren’t trained engineers. They shouldn’t have to be. We’re the experts in the room. That’s literally what we’re hired for. We should act like it and stop trying to pass blame to other people.
Upper management doesn't have to be trained engineer. However immediate direct management of development team definitely have to be trained engineers to be competent.
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.
Whilst I agree in some respects, the biggest gulf to me is between companies like Stripe who successfully manage a large chunk of the words commerce (led by a brilliant engineer-CEO) and the 'IT Projects' that seem to plague the public sector here in the UK.
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
It’s not about having a PhD. If I pay to have a house built, the point of paying money to a construction company is that I don’t know how to build a house. I’m hiring them because they’re experts and I’m not. If the house falls down and kills someone, the construction company is responsible. I don’t know how to tell if a building is safe because I’m not a working engineer. (And even if I was, it’s still the construction company’s job to build my house properly. That’s what I’m paying them for.)
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.
I think your analogy is a bit off, construction projects are primarily in their nature one-offs. If I was a restaurant owner and needed a new restaurant built then sure I'd expect someone to take all the responsibility. If I wanted a new chef to design a menu, keep standards up and also roll out new dishes then the restaurant owner should know about food, it's their "bread and butter"
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.
I hear what you're saying; but I think its hopelessly naive and unrealistic to expect the CEOs of large companies (like banks, telcos, insurance companies, etc) to learn enough Python that they can make competent technical decisions.
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.
Of course, we shouldn't expect the CEO of the PO to dig into code, and we shouldn't excuse the standards of engineers.
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
Right. But also, if a surgeon doesn't wash their hands and a patient dies as a result, the surgeon is at fault. Not the hospital's management team. Or, not just the hospital's management team.
A good jockey isn’t a guy who can run like a horse. A good manager doesn’t even need to know how to program, let alone be an expert debugger who can spot errors made by their team.
A jockey needs to know what a horse is and how a horse lives, trains, runs, etc.
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.
> A manager that has no technical knowledge is useless
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.
If managers are hired only because they're experts at managing humans, then they're inadequate for the role of managing a dev team. These guys are not just managing people, they're managing processes that they have to know something about to manage effectively.
You can't expect managers to have the same level of technical expertise as the people they are managing. In your view of the world, specialization doesn't exist.
I'm not saying i expect that at all. I'm saying they should have some knowledge about what they are managing than just being a people person. Wouldn't you hate your direct manager having no clue what a code review is? What scrum is? How features are estimated? How estimates can be widely inaccurate? What tech debt is and why it should not be swept under the rug?
That looks a lot like incompetent management.