AFAIC, anything they can do to suppress the raving lunacy of people like the ones who convinced that poor man to leave hospital, may he rest in peace, is a good thing in my book.
Well I understood it perfectly as in I read it as "modularity, type-safety, and maintainability"...then again I am familiar with DDD and thus understand the ubiquitous language from the original comment...which is kind of one of the main points from DDD ;)
I can't say I disagree with many of the points made in the article, but I am getting just a little tired of what I perceive to be the current trend of generalised manager-bashing these days...I transitioned from dev to manager a few years back and whilst I'm definitely not the greatest leader ever, I am also definitely not anything like the tired stereotypes portrayed in the article (case in point: when a dev tells me "two weeks" I smile and say "I believe you meant SIX weeks, right?". And then it takes 4, but everyone's happy cos the stakeholders got it 2 weeks "early" and the dev can sleep at night knowing the code is rock solid. etc.
This "Us vs Them" thing is bollox - we're all on the same team as far as I am concerned!
And, even though I have a good 20+ years of development behind me, I can honestly say that the two BEST engineering managers I ever had were people that could not have written a line of code to save their lives...they were just brilliant leaders and motivators who focused on me as an individual and trusted me enough to have the technical chops to get the job done whilst they meat-shielded us against waves of shite from the C-suite.
Well anyway, what would I know, I'm just a dumb-ass manager :)
> I can honestly say that the two BEST engineering managers I ever had were people that could not have written a line of code to save their lives
This is some truth to this. On the other hand, there are a lot of dumb-ass power wielding managers who think technical chops are low level stuff and look down on the engineers. The second group outweighs the first by a factor of 3 at least
> when a dev tells me "two weeks" I smile and say "I believe you meant SIX weeks, right?"
Wanted to chime in and say _thank you_ for giving me the prompt that this is an "OK" thing to do. (as a technique for trying to encourage/help devs build in good buffer)
As another dev-converted-to-manger, who was also somewhat taken back by that same perception of the malicious manager (I certainly had that perception from time to time as an eng, so it's not entirely foreign although I am surprised by how widespread it seems to have become) what you've written really resonates with me; One consequence is that I've become way more forgiving (in terms of trying to proactively improve it) for what I used to perceive as "bad management" as I struggle to improve my own techniques :P
> This "Us vs Them" thing is bollox - we're all on the same team as far as I am concerned!
I swear I want to scream this from the rooftops in many of the ragging-on-management threads I see but I know it's not the dev's fault for feeling miffed, a bad manager can _wreck_ your life, but I wish I had a magic password I could tell devs to let them know "I'm here to make you/your work successful, not the other way around, and if I'm ever failing at that I _want to fix it_."
(As sister responses point out, this is something earned, and fully agree, it can just often be an uphill battle, potentially rationally from what devs have experienced prior; again just trying to give everyone in the picture the benefit of the doubt as I'd hope they would me.)
This reminds me of something that came up a while ago here, Lou Holtz's three questions asked of a leader: Can I trust you? Are you committed? Do you care about me?
I think that is a fair point and anecdotally at least it gels with what I have observed. I've worked in quite a few food service settings when I was younger and the margins (in general of course; Soup du Jour is like 5/600% margin at least) are very thin.
However I wonder if this isn't just a symptom of the bigger problem; in order to pay better wages, consumer prices have to be raised because it's the only way to make enough margin to pay the employees BUT the real reason margins are so thin is because you are paying exorbitant rent to some faceless landlord who actually owns the building you operate out of; and it only ever goes up, never down; and your suppliers constantly raise their prices (or lower their quality) because they are in the same boat; and thus all that money that is generated by the tip of the spear (the restaurant, the retail store, the pub) is mostly being pushed back up to....the people who already have all the money...which is why they own all the buildings and rent them out to make more money....and so on. Just a thought :)
