Managers who don't code

...shouldnt be managers over people who does.

Have you ever seen a manager managing a group of construction engineers who knows nothing of the construction business?

Still better than managers that code badly

Best manager I’ve ever had wasn’t technical but never claimed to be, instead he trusted the devs on the team to decide what they thought was best and backed us to the hilt.

I’ve had much more trouble with managers who do code.
Their code tends to be shit and because they’re in authority they don’t take criticism well.

I think the issue is not coding knowledge.

It's the managing that makes managers useless.

Be a Product Owner, take ownership over product flows, user experience and technical debt and pre-refine requirements.

Be an Agile Coach, help people to develop in an agile way, guard backlogs from having ill-defined or scope exploding tasks.

Be a Scrum Master, lead meetings and unburden developers.

Be anything you want, go find out how you can serve the team.

Just don't be a fucking manager.

I've had managers that weren't coders, and weren't really technical. They've just been managers in technical organizations for a long time operating on career inertia.

A non-technical manager who purposefully gets rid of roadblocks and 'greases the wheel' of development are great to have, until you reach the invisible upper-boundary of their 'non-technical' nature.

You'll know you've reached that point when the non-technical manager just lets anyone do anything and before you know it you've got a half-finished, wholly-broken feature because the non-technical manager didn't know when to step in and say "no".

@ComputerToucher

That's the reason why there shouldn't be a single hierarchy tree.

You need someone to guard the process (agile coach/scrum master), you need someone to research features (business analyst/UX), you need someone to integrate ideations into the existing reality (product owner), you need someone to translate requirements into technical design (solutions architect) and you need someone to yell when things aren't working (QA & SRE).

None of those people should be "managing" other people.

There should be clear responsibilities, and reporting lines, but not necessarily tree-shaped.

@bittersweet I agree with everything you've just said here.

Can you drop by office on Monday and have a chat with my executives on this type of org structure? I'll kick in $5 on your plane tickets. No meal stipends tho, you're own your own there.

(less jokingly: yes, there's all sorts of "shoulds" in the practice of software development, I feel like if more of those "should" and "should be's" were practiced in reality, this community probably wouldn't exist).

@ComputerToucher

True, although to be completely honest...

*Bittersweet moved task "helping companies to improve their organizational structure" to low-prio*

*Bittersweet is now working on "clearing out his pantry, replacing covid masks with food, energy storage, iodine tablets, water filters and an EN/RU dictionary"*

And when they think that they know how to code and give you estimates is the worst

Still better than having coders that don't know how to manage in leadership positions.

@nachocode "it's just a little if" they say...

Feels like heaven