This is an overly cynical view of management. Distrust and "screwed by estimations" are signs that the dynamic needs tweaking, not that all dynamics are like this.
People with managerial backgrounds can become quite adept at helping you:
- Identify blindspots in your biases and behavior that keep you from peak performance
- Avoid working on stuff that's not valuable to your team
- Settle disputes within a group
- Motivate you and keep you engaged/fulfilled with your work
- Get unstuck with personal problems
This is not an exhaustive list and you don't have to have a 'managerial background' to master stuff like this. I am an engineer who has had to learn management as a startup founder. I used to distrust the whole management thing but that kept me from growing as a teammate. Management is not only useful in 'non technical' jobs, it's useful in all human endeavors it's why we study it so much and why it has so much leverage.
A cynical or experienced view? I'm in management and have seen good managers and bad, but the bad ones are quite a few. To address your points, managers with a non technical background:
- Cannot identify blind spots that keep you at peak performance, only another engineer with more experience (tech lead or senior) can do so. They can only identify behaviors that make them look bad or are inconvenient when viewed from the point of view of their peers -- other managers.
- A non technical manager has literally no idea what is valuable to delivering complex technical work. They can only guess, and often guess badly. Again only a senior or tech lead with experience could do this.
- How could a non technical manager motivate any engineer, without an understanding of their difficulties, problems and ways to solve these problems practically? I just don't buy it. "Let's do overtime on the weekend guys..."
- Managers should not be involved with people's personal problems. I've met so many managers that are extroverted and managing sensitive introverted teams, that all they ultimately do is the equivalent of hammer on the aquarium glass. Remember that sign in the pet store: "Don't tap on the glass"? It's true of technical teams that are of a totally different temperament than managers.
> A cynical or experienced view? I'm in management and have seen good managers and bad, but the bad ones are quite a few. To address your points, managers with a non technical background:
Thanks for the detailed breakdown and no name calling :D
> Cannot identify blind spots that keep you at peak performance, only another engineer with more experience (tech lead or senior) can do so. They can only identify behaviors that make them look bad or are inconvenient when viewed from the point of view of their peers -- other managers.
Given you have different levels of skill in the team, a good manager would convince you and the other teammate to help each other out with the learning. Lubricating these interactions given everyone has responsibilities is not always trivial. I'm less experienced on the politics but I believe what you're saying about politics distorting incentives. I'm conveniently side-stepping this issue bc it applies to all positions in a corporate structure.
> A non technical manager has literally no idea what is valuable to delivering complex technical work. They can only guess, and often guess badly. Again only a senior or tech lead with experience could do this.
A non technical manager can know very well what's valuable to the product/company. That they don't believe their team on the value of a specific piece of technical work to enable that seems like something else is at play here (lack of trust).
> How could a non technical manager motivate any engineer, without an understanding of their difficulties, problems and ways to solve these problems practically? I just don't buy it. "Let's do overtime on the weekend guys..."
By reminding/reframing/convincing re:impact their work has on their team, personal growth, customers, society or personal preferences. Doesn't have to be only technical; they can help you deal with any self-inflicted discomfort regardless of the subject matter.
> Managers should not be involved with people's personal problems. I've met so many managers that are extroverted and managing sensitive introverted teams, that all they ultimately do is the equivalent of hammer on the aquarium glass. Remember that sign in the pet store: "Don't tap on the glass"? It's true of technical teams that are of a totally different temperament than managers.
Agree to disagree. I've had great conversations with peers when/if we're open to talking about non-work stuff - both ways not just me 'giving advice'. It's not binary and depends on the relationship. A skilled manager can care for reports beyond work, create genuine bonds and be respectful when they have not been given an opening to engage in these subjects.
> A non technical manager can know very well what's valuable to the product/company. That they don't believe their team on the value of a specific piece of technical work to enable that seems like something else is at play here (lack of trust).
Trust is a difficult commodity to build, a lot of company culture issues stem from lack of trust. It's particularly key to the manager/team relationship.
When you have a non-technical manager directly over technical teams it's particularly difficult to build trust. People, emotionally, want to have someone really understand them. Someone who doesn't, at a fundamental level, understand the actual work you're doing is going to be at a disadvantage as the work is crux of the purpose of the interaction.
Not to say that it is impossible, someone with well above average people reading and listening skills can still build that trust and get it. But it's definitely going to be more difficult than someone who really knows the turf.
As a startup founder you are automatically at the top of the company food-chain.
Managers in the middle of the food-chain are all about power-struggle and social games they play to out-compete each other.
That is especially the case for non-technical managers who don’t have a sense for the underlying technical challenges. They have all their bandwidth available for political positioning and social games.
It would be great if all managers where “serving the team” in the sense of your bullet points. But alas many don’t see it that way.
IMHO many startups are successful because they have a technical person at the top. Who is capable to understand, evaluate and positively reward technical work within their organization.
Part of the reason for that - especially in tech - is we keep hiring people utterly unsuited to manage others. Pretty much every manager I've had is a software engineer in the past. But, only one manager was a true manager who helped me with the technical stuff, career and personal growth. The rest were all great people but totally inadequate as a manager.
In tech and pretty much every company I've worked at, you need to get into a managerial position to be able to have a say in what get built and how much you get paid. Programming fatigue and frustration with being told what to do also sets in after a while. The two together convinces people who are terrible with their people management skills to chase a manager-path career.
Essentially, you're diagnosing the symptom to be the cause.
Just figuring out what is important / not important to the company alone is enormously important.
I’ve seen multiple times my careers were dozens of people no will work for months on something that just isn’t important.
Being able to put things in terms like this feature will cost us $1 million in developer time. We can expect a return of $50,000 over the life of the product. Or vice versa.
People with managerial backgrounds can become quite adept at helping you:
- Identify blindspots in your biases and behavior that keep you from peak performance
- Avoid working on stuff that's not valuable to your team
- Settle disputes within a group
- Motivate you and keep you engaged/fulfilled with your work
- Get unstuck with personal problems
This is not an exhaustive list and you don't have to have a 'managerial background' to master stuff like this. I am an engineer who has had to learn management as a startup founder. I used to distrust the whole management thing but that kept me from growing as a teammate. Management is not only useful in 'non technical' jobs, it's useful in all human endeavors it's why we study it so much and why it has so much leverage.