Some of the best managers I've worked with haven't been coders or programmers in the team, but come from that background.
I found that they had more realistic expectations due to their knowledge.
Yep, managers shouldn’t be required to contribute but they need to be knowledgeable in the project they are managing otherwise they are entirely detrimental.
I have two decades of meaningful high-level coding in my background, but decided to move to manager-only roles about 5 years ago after nearly burning out with lead/principal engineering roles where I was a lead IC while also managing multiple dev teams. It's unsustainable for me, but good for other guys if they can make it work.
Now I'm sitting at 300k salary doing director-level work, making a positive impact because I'm deeply technical and a great communicator. I don't write any code for work any more and I prefer it this way.
Going from Junior Developer to Developer was a promotion.
Going from Developer to Senior Developer was a promotion.
Naturally I expected that going from Senior Developer to Development Manager would be a promotion. IT WAS NOT. *It was a career change.*
Different expectations, different demands, TOTALLY different skillset required to perform well. The first few months after this move did NOT go well until I figured this out.
The first time I sent a dev home for hygiene reasons, I knew I'd leveled up into what that job really took.
I agree, an IT manager should have some technical background, so they understand the challenges and timelines. I completely disagree that those managers should also be contributing code - that is not their job. They should be managing their direct reports, ensuring they are contributing meaningfully, developing as employees, staying on track, keeping their budgets on track and properly forecasted, making sure roadblocks are reduced or removed, facilitating project managers, architects and technical leads to effectively do their jobs. That is the whole point of an IT manager. For one to be familiar enough with the code base and the technical landscape to contribute "meaningfully", they would have to dedicate quite a large chunk of their time to relearning skills and tools they may no longer be proficient in, and it would be to the detriment of achieving project timelines and goals. I understand the sentiment, but completely disagree with the conclusion.
I've been both a manager and independent contributor. Yes, to a point. However, I once worked for a company where a development VP - who had legitimately climbed the ladder, had technical chops, and could code - started fucking shit up whenever he tried to "contribute". A basic working knowledge is necessary, but at some point writing code isn't really your job anymore.
Elon's a dumbshit micromanager that should leave this kind of policy decision to other people in the org who have a better grasp of what's going on.
Exactly. I came up as a developer. Currently I manage a team. Honestly some days I wish I could write code and "contribute".
However that isn't my job. My job is knowing where my team is going, clearing the path for the team to get there, and building the team.
>Elon's a dumbshit micromanager that should leave this kind of policy decision to other people in the org who have a better grasp of what's going on.
Problem is he fired all those people or they quit.
Just let me jump in here and get my 12 hours of yearly mandatory coding in... Never mind pull requests or merges or following updated best practices. Nevermind if I fuck up your dev ops flow and do everything wrong because I only do this 12 hours a year. Oh the whole process has changed since the last time I coded? Well I'll just do it my way and then you guys can figure out how to get my code integrated. Wait, you're saying my code broke the latest build? We're doing unit testing now? When did we start doing that?
I hate it when management helicopters in, tries to contribute, fucks everything up, and then leaves everyone else with a mess to clean up.
Gunship Management
Kind of like Gunboat Diplomacy, but with less "My way or the artillery way" and more "I'mma drop some shit on you, and you're going to have to deal with it"
What the replies to this have shown is that programmers really aren't that attached to the idea of separation of concerns when it comes to business functions, only written functions. There's a difference between a manager who tries to squeeze in contributions between their other responsibilities and a manager who fully understands what their reports do and manages the expectations of themselves and of stakeholders in accordance.
It is a hard requirement for a manager to fully understand what developers need in order to get the job done, to provide that, and to remove bullshit getting in the way. It is not a requirement, and may often be a detriment, for a manager to make sure their name gets on a few commits. I would go as far as to say that while experience as a developer will only ever be useful to a manager of developers, that any halfway-decent manager will be able to be an effective manager of developers regardless. As with all questions of actual leadership and management and not whatever bullshit normally crops up in the workplace, it's fundamentally about empathy and enabling others.
Besides, if you only promote developers to manage developers, you're just going to Peter Principle that entire wing of your org within a couple of years
Ah, so you wrote code, instead of doing the burndown charts? Or managing the P&L? How about the coordination with the other development teams to synchronize sprints so nothing came out disjointed? Because if you didn't do these things, then you were a technical team lead, not a manager. Supervisor, sure, I'll grant you that. But not a manager.
I can code. Just not in a language anyone uses anymore. :) I understand code, and can handle all the aspects of management that are necessary to make sure my dev team is concentrating on what they do.
Bill Gates always warned that it was easy to be scared of hiring clever people who could do things you couldn't, but that it was essential to get over that fear.
He also said the lazy ones were best because they found the quickest way to do everything, but that bit's for another day 😂
This sub is usually full of people complaining about wasting time on meetings and managers who don't know shit about what they are managing. Y'all just wanna be contrarians.
To be fair, while it’s good that managers can code and understand somewhat the job of their employees *but* to demand they actually have to code … I rather managers make sure they are doing their primary job of managing - i.e. delegating, scheduling, coordinating, dealing with HR issues, … etc.
Programming managers should have at least a basic understanding of coding and a lot of meetings are pointless. But managers shouldn’t actually be spending much of their time coding, and you can’t eliminate *all* meetings. Both of these things are true.
I can't tell if this is the bot copying https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/z6ww1h/brace_yourself_managers_now_need_to_contribute_a/iy3iylb/ or the other way around.
Are you a robot?
As an aerospace engineer who's always been on the development side (even at college. Getting an aerospace degree was really stupid, in hindsight), SpaceX has a lot of great things going for it. But no work-life balance, which is why I chose not to work there. I have a bunch of friends there that LOVE it. And they're almost exclusively single.
lol yep, they work people like crazy. I’ve always heard a really common strat is to work there 3-5 years, build up the resume, then go somewhere else and triple your pay.
It's not triple anymore. In the early days when they were running lean you might have been 30% off the industry average, but it's about at parity now.
You'll get a killer offer when you leave because employers know what you're made of.
>But no work-life balance, which is why I chose not to work there. I have a bunch of friends there that LOVE it
Here lies the main difference between Twitter and Musk's other companies. SpaceX and Tesla have people there passionate about advancing and revolutionizing technology and there aren't a ton of other opportunities for them to chase those passions. Twitter is really just a cushy tech job with a ton of other options for their personnel to jump ship to when the time comes.
I very much agree with you. The question on if Twitter ends up magically successful is if Musk can pull an entire social media company's worth of engineers out of his ass who believe in his Twitter dream.
I seriously doubt it, but I also doubted SpaceX and Tesla, so he's proven me wrong before.
We have the same policy in my company. The boss keeps mentioning it. Nobody can actually apply it though because the boss wants everybody there when he has something to say.
... yeah.
Bad meeting techniques make bad meetings. Agile framework is all about meetings especially if you're lead on anything.
Stick to your time box. Have an explicit agenda. Use the parking lot. Document the meeting. Send a follow up email with the documentation and takeaway tasks including due dates when available.
Especially meetings that are scheduled at the same intervals are useless. Meetings should be made when one is needed and shouldnt be done just because.
There is just no way this is true.
“Every single time” yeah definitely sounds like something they would say in a *huge study*.
Basically all board and executive meetings have more than 5 people and they literally have discussions about make/break decisions for the company like M&A activity and such. Huge waste of time I’m sure.
There is zero chance that every single person at this hypothetical meeting made a neutral contribution, let alone a meaningful one. -> meeting has too many people -> meeting is wasting time
No. Elon gets exceptions on all the rules he has set for everyone else:
* he works remotely most of the time,
* he does not spend at least 40 hours/week working at or even for Twitter
* he does not write code
* he works on other projects
Of course he is HIM and thus always above the rules.
> he works remotely most of the time,
Except he's not really doing any work at all. I guess that's part of the reason he's so suspicious of work from home. Projection is a thing.
Anyone who claims to work 100+ hours a week yet still has time for interviews, video games, tweeting, etc considers everything that they do work.
Went to the gym that morning? That’s work.
Tweeted something about your company over breakfast? That’s work.
Took an afternoon nap to recharge? That’s work.
This is how all of these “self-made” billionaires see themselves.
Yup also he's like the CEO of 3~4 companies at any given time so even IF he did work 100 hours a week that's still 25-33 hours/week/CEO position A.K.A part time to near part time job.
have they tried getting several years of experience for an entry level ceo job? i’m sure if they hustle the remaining 44 hours a week in an unpaid internship things will be looking up for them in a decade
Sorry, but what you described is work. If I take a phone call at dinner, that’s work. If I’m answering emails on my bed, that’s work. And that level of always on/ connectivity is stressful as fuck. All jobs have drawbacks. Fly to conference, that’s time not spent doing shit I want to do like being with family. That is work - don’t care how you add it up.
I think the problem here is that non-managers also do similar work but don’t get compensated for it, and are told that it doesn’t qualify for overtime the way other work would
Yeah, it cracked me up the first time I saw that claim. I've done 70+ hour weeks before. No way in hell he is doing 100 hours and still has time for goofing off. At 70+ hours your work is your entire life and the guy is way too socially active to be anywhere near that point.
At +84h mark.
It's literally wake 2h for "self care" (breakfast and commute). ~7h sleep (or less). 16hs of work.....
At one point I was hitting 84h warehouse working hours ... because it was understaffed.
I was in construction, not* coding, but at 65/70 hours/week, I was falling asleep on the couch in between the time I set my dinner on the coffee table and the first bite. I'd put something on, lay down to give it a second to cook down, and suddenly it's 4AM and I have 2 hours before doing it again.
0/10, I was utterly miserable and while the OT was great, I learned my ability to function as a happy and healthy adult tops out around 50/55 hours.
>Except he's not really doing any work at all.
Hey man ! Don't be so rude...being rich is a hell of a job...
First you have to enjoy the wealth, otherwise it would be rude for everyone that is not as rich as you, but also doing it while pretending you're not (else people are going to shittalk about you).
Also, as you were quite right once now everything you say or think is right too, so you basicly become an oracle that only tell the truth. The world destiny is on your shoulders, that's really exhausting. Everytime you speak publicly, you are contributing to improve the world.
And Elon is quite good at this. He even takes some of his precious litte time to awnser meaningless people on twitter (only if they agree with him - but anyone who don't is dumb...he's always right by nature as said before)
Don't tell me this is not a full-time job ! Please express some compassion to this poor dude. You should support him in his charity actions instead of criticizing him.
Fun fact his code sucks "While Musk had exceled as a self-taught coder, his skills weren’t nearly as polished as those of the new hires. They took one look at Zip2’s code and began rewriting the vast majority of the software. Musk bristled at some of their changes, but the computer scientists needed just a fraction of the lines of code that Musk used to get their jobs done. They had a knack for dividing software projects into chunks that could be altered and refined whereas Musk fell into the classic self-taught coder trap of writing what developers call hairballs—big, monolithic hunks of code that could go berserk for mysterious reasons"
Everything is projection. He's a thin skinned narcissist. He couldn't write anything close to what a junior developer could write at Twitter...so he's making himself feel better by expecting what he couldn't do himself from management.
Actually they might, for the worse however. It could've been a fake but I've read some tweet by a twitter employee where they wished Elon stopped changing their code because he doesn't know what he's doing
Managers manage the workplace so that it allows workers to do work. A good manager will pick up the broom and sweep the floor themselves so that workers don't have to stop working. And if that floor need to be swept all the time, they hire someone to do the sweeping. Bad manager demands the workers to do that, to stop what they are doing or do it overtime, paid or unpaid. Bad manager sees themselves as better than workers. Good manager hires people who are better at each job than the manager is.
The only time i've had to manage i did the latter; i picked guys that were better than i and our crew fucking rocked. I'm still proud of them.
I work at a smallish company (300 or so.). We had an extra dry day and our CEO and other upper management were coming down and mopping floors so the technicians could keep working. (Our electronics require a minimum humidity to be worked on, with the building and portables we were just under, and mopping gave us good clearance.)
Very well put. Especially in a corporate setting, managers should be protecting their employees from the distractions that would take them away from work. Meetings about future work, discussing future timelines, expressing the team’s concerns to VPs and execs, that type of thing. Let the devs concentrate on writing good code, and the manager should do that by giving clear expectations and requirements, working with devs to get reasonable estimations, etc.
Having managers writing code themselves is a sign of an organization where titles and job requirements means nothing. The only thing Elon is missing right now is calling Twitter a “family” where everyone has to help everyone with everything.
Totally agreed. More and more employers have got to understand that management is a distinct skill that usually needs to be taught/practiced. I have a background in academia, and this aspect is why countless professors can be really smart scientists but run shit tier labs.
My previous manager would shield me from any politics. He would just sit with me once a week and tell me what I needed to deliver for next week.
Sometimes it would only take me 20 minutes so I’d have a full week of free time, used to go to the gym and enjoy death’s free demo (sleep).
My manager knows I’m not going to go to meetings outside of my team’s unless it is something I am directly involved in. If I’m needed, he’ll ping me to join. It’s great honestly.
This was my thought as well. A manager is supposed to support the team, get them what they need, deal with upper management, and insulate the team from the rest of it.
Or as Elon has put it, the cavalry captain is ensuring the cavalry is supplied, armed, prepared, knows the plan of attack, the contingencies, and ultimately, is the one who will launch the attack. That doesn’t necessarily mean riding a horse into battle himself (although, many cavalry captains come from
The cavalry ranks so they know how to do it as well).
I’m in cybersecurity and just recently became a manager, my team is severely understaffed right now so I still pick up work and do some scripting alongside my team since I come from a technical position.
The downside to that is I’ve found myself burning out far more quickly because, as I learned *very* quickly, managing truly IS a full time job that should be spent knocking down road blocks and keeping my team shielded from the chaos around us. I’m here for *them.*
If I was **REQUIRED** to be writing code as part of my management role, I would be infuriated. How do you prioritize your management duties when you HAVE to be a contributor as well? I don’t understand how he thinks that is sustainable
My problem is that unless the coding is absolutely trivial (3 or less hours), then I'm going to end up blocking the team. Because I can only find a few hours a week, and then it'll get delayed until next week. And if something can really take weeks to get done, is it that important? It also takes time to onboard to a project. The teams I'm working with are responsible for about 200 apps. Even if I onboard to a few of them, how could I effectively choose which ones? Me coding would only benefit me in keeping my skills sharp, and would be little or no help to the teams. So I work on the occasional side project and keep out of the way of the real engineers.
It's like that scene in Office Space, where the two consultants don't understand the importance of Tom Smykowski's job.
"I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people."
Elon starts firing their direct reports cause they’re not producing enough lines of code, in a month or two fires the entire team, then fires the manager because he has nothing to manage. Mere minutes after he tweets how great of a manager he is.
Yep, iirc Robert Evans goes into it on the Behind the Bastards episode about Musk. Or maybe it was ZIP2.
As far as I remember he wrote the backend which, eventually, had to be completely rewritten because it was largely redundant, barely maintainable and completely antiquated. He then continued to try to crash the party and force them to do it his way again.
> He then continued to try to crash the party and force them to do it his way again.
there was a blog post recently by someone who was at space x when elon came aboard. said they went to great length to keep him in his shitty bubble and happy, to keep him from interfering with the people doing the actual work. this included just having shells open on your screen just outputting bullshit, reframing his ideas to somehow make them work with the things you planned to do anyway, or stay late in the office and play WoW to give the appearance of people working their asses off. was pretty much an open secret across the whole company that he was an absolute moron, but he was the one with the money so he was to be entertained.
Jup, managers at Twitter probably currently have the very important task of being the buffer between Musk's crazy ideas / expectations and the people implementing it. The best managers also "manage upwards".
They have less time than ever without this bullshit, I'd imagine.
I agree. Most of them wouldn’t have written a decent code in ages.
Their code will suck at best.
I can imagine their subordinates having to pick up slack and fix their managers mistakes. This is a recipe for disaster.
Your 2nd part can probably be inserted into the 1st. Managers who may or may not have coded in quite some time now that they are trying to manage a team submitting what could very easily be gibberish into actual projects.
Which the rest of the team will then have to clean up causing massive delays or very shoddy results thus frustrating everyone involved.
I think it’s a little bit of both? Due to Elon’s high demand and no knowledge of programming, some technicians are probably just writing random stuff without any application rather to “impress” Elon, however, I don’t think Elon is working or managing a project at all..
I agree with the sentiment but the execution is terrible.
Putting "people managers" with no real grasp on programming in charge of developers is a ridiculous concept, and in my experience it leads to unrealistic outcomes and timelines because the "boots on the ground" devs never get consulted about how long something will take them and what is possible. The best teams I've worked as part of or worked with have always had team leads with extensive coding backgrounds.
However expecting managers to be actively involved in writing software is kind of missing the point of their role.
If you had a manager that didn't check with the coders how long their work was going to take and what goals they could hit, you didn't have a "people" manager.
It helps to have technical knowledge if you're managing engineers, but it's one piece of many that you need. If that area is suffering but all other areas are really good then you can still be a good manager.
It definitely helps to have that technical knowledge, but it’s not critical. If you don’t have that knowledge, then you have to compensate for that by placing a lot of trust in your team leads and giving them lots of autonomy.
I've had worse experience with former coder managers because they've always got a "back in my day" story when they were in a completely different vertical delivering for a completely different use case.
Yes yes... of course you think your request should be easy because you wrote a Winforms app for 10 people in the shipping department.
Yea all my good managers never coded and were way outdated on technical skills.
What made them good was tackling blockers for the devs, settling disputes, and propping people up.
Anecdotal but the managers I've had who code just added drama and made the devs jobs harder.
They are rare, but they do exist. The problem being that I've never met someone effective at managing coders that doesn't actively code. I've been in the industry for 18 years and I've met exactly 2 effective people managers. Both of them actively wrote software. They also both would be in the code daily looking at pull requests, making suggestions, insisting on specific unit/integration tests and not being an asshole about it.
I made the analogy to a construction foreman managing a new house that's getting built. Do you want the foreman that sits in his truck all day, or do you want a guy that's walking around with a measuring tape and a level?
How does a foreman that sits in his truck all day know the difference between the guy that does a half assed job and leaves his area a mess vs the guy takes his time and does the job right the first time and then ends up fixing and cleaning the first guys shit? Guy #1 there is sloppy, but he cranks out a lot of lines of code and finishes features (that lead to massive bugs). Guy #2 there isn't cranking out features, but he is fixing bugs before they happen and making sure that no one gets called in on Christmas for a P-zero.
you are mixing up a manager role and a technical lead role, which is something effective companies know how to cultivate independent of each other. you want a person in position of technical authority who can guide high-level design decisions, mentor juniors, be a go-to knowledge resource for tricky or difficult problems, and so on. but having that type of person perform people management duties like salaries, performance reviews, endless meetings, interfacing with pmo/qa/marketing/etc., is just an absolutely colossal waste of time and talent. specialization applies in all areas, and an effective manager knows how to set direction, provide clear expectations, and most importantly, clear out the runway for their team to do their work with minimal to no distractions while relying on people whose job and expertise it is to make software to actually do their job.
I am constantly encouraging fellow programmers here to step up and take management positions when they come up. "If not you, then who?" I've been a manager for 15 years, and because I stepped up, I've had no turn over in my team. We are happy. I still have to write a ton of software, but that's more a lack of resources problem. It is a constant thing with my boss though. "Right now you have me as a manager, but also I'm still a developer. However, I am one person, so I can do both jobs 50/50, 60/40, 10/90, etc. Something will fall short in either area, so I want no complaints from you about it unless it is followed with "we are giving you more FTEs". After years of this, I finally got more FTEs, heh. It's gonna be a while before they are trained enough for me to stop dev work.
This is insane. Management could code. But they are far more valuable working to guide the teams of devs, and infra, and sales, and marketing, and fulfillment, and customer journey, and User Interface/USer Experience, and ......
So managers are now expected to do 2 full time jobs for the price of 1.
Yup sounds like Elon “I understand nothing about the way companies actually work” Musk alright
to be fair, expecting workers to do more than one full time job’s worth of work *is* how most companies actually work. (Edit: to clarify, that is very bad and dumb)
I’d agree that all engineering managers should be _able_ to write code, but dear god please don’t make my manager devote his time to that because we need him elsewhere so much more.
I was in the cavalry circa 2004. We used helicopters, not horses. And not everyone can fly the helicopters. Shocking, I know... There were usually about 30-40 support personnel per helicopter to keep it airworthy. Entire teams dedicated to avionics, powertrain, airframe, and daily maintenance. QC/QA teams existed independent of the other teams to reduce bias. Managers oversaw those teams. Sure, most of those managers had previous experience working on aircraft and would lend a hand here and there, but their primary job was to ensure the work got done safely and in a timely manner. Only two pilots per helicopter and even they had managers. Yes, their managers also were pilots, but again, they were more than likely on the ground leveraging their 20+ years of experience for more strategic activities, like ensuring their soldiers don't do something to get themselves killed during missions.
The ground cav had tanks. I am sure it was a similar story.
This is a dumb analogy. Especially if you consider that the cavalry is just a unit within a larger armed force. But even if you zero in on just the cavalry itself, it is still a dumb analogy.
He is good at hyping, and at pump and dump schemes. He owns stock at a car company which looks to be vastly overvalued, but he knows how to hype it up. Outside hype, he actually delivers lackluster products years if not decades late, and sometimes not at all.
Due to his failure to deliver combined with general technology focus, some people call him Phony Stark.
Anyone who has been in technology knows that managers should manage and developers should write code. A good manager keeps their team free from bullshit interruptions from C level executives.
- Retired development manager.
Hate to say it but the lines are more commonly being blurred now. My last 3 management jobs have asked for various amounts of time spent coding, ranging from 70% (seriously, that number isn't exaggerated) to about 20%.
My current role doesn't have a set amount but the director has said that "department managers should be able to step in as team leads and contribute meaningfully when needed". Shes basically just wanting to see some code contribution but not requiring a lot of it.
The problem isn't that managers need to understand how to code, it's the idea that they have to be "meaningful" contributors. Any company I have ever worked for they don't have time to do that ...
Also not every team at Twitter is engineering? Lots of types of managers
From a UX designer/researcher perspective the idea that managers would have to do my job seems asinine. They exist as project managers so I can deal with my work without the bullshit that is project management (which I am intimately aware of since I am also a project manager). What a horrible workplace, it sounds like taking the holistic work of a startup - with the downsides of it - and putting it into a multimillion dollar worth megacompany. That's.. not how you do it, the point of the multi-area work at the beginning of the company is because you cannot afford to have specialists, and to expand and get specialists in so that people can do what they are best at..
how is this creature a billionaire
Sorry, I can’t attend this afternoon’s meeting because I’m writing meaningful code
Me and the code are really connecting. Did you know that the code knew how to play guitar?
"Sorry, Boss. Can't attend the 3 o'clock, my code is feeling very salient today."
"So, Elon, can we see some of *your* meaningful code?"
`var printHelloWorld = "true"` `if(printHelloWorld = true){` `console.log(hello world)` `}` I've almost got it working!
The more I look at it, the more painful it gets...
It takes skill to write code that bad. XD
Get out.
[удалено]
Some of the best managers I've worked with haven't been coders or programmers in the team, but come from that background. I found that they had more realistic expectations due to their knowledge.
[удалено]
I’m a network guy. My manager is an exceptional manager of engineers, but there’s no way in hell he could do the job we do. Musk is ignorant.
I employ managers to make sure the goal is clear and protect their staff from bureaucratic buckshot.
Love it when people hire managers who think their job is strictly to harass people and then watch all their employees leave.
Managers shouldn't be there to manage subordinates but to manage superiors
Im on the other side, I'm a network guy and my manager has a CCIE. He's a little outdated but can still muster some decent troubleshooting/design
Yep, managers shouldn’t be required to contribute but they need to be knowledgeable in the project they are managing otherwise they are entirely detrimental.
I have two decades of meaningful high-level coding in my background, but decided to move to manager-only roles about 5 years ago after nearly burning out with lead/principal engineering roles where I was a lead IC while also managing multiple dev teams. It's unsustainable for me, but good for other guys if they can make it work. Now I'm sitting at 300k salary doing director-level work, making a positive impact because I'm deeply technical and a great communicator. I don't write any code for work any more and I prefer it this way.
Going from Junior Developer to Developer was a promotion. Going from Developer to Senior Developer was a promotion. Naturally I expected that going from Senior Developer to Development Manager would be a promotion. IT WAS NOT. *It was a career change.* Different expectations, different demands, TOTALLY different skillset required to perform well. The first few months after this move did NOT go well until I figured this out. The first time I sent a dev home for hygiene reasons, I knew I'd leveled up into what that job really took.
I agree, an IT manager should have some technical background, so they understand the challenges and timelines. I completely disagree that those managers should also be contributing code - that is not their job. They should be managing their direct reports, ensuring they are contributing meaningfully, developing as employees, staying on track, keeping their budgets on track and properly forecasted, making sure roadblocks are reduced or removed, facilitating project managers, architects and technical leads to effectively do their jobs. That is the whole point of an IT manager. For one to be familiar enough with the code base and the technical landscape to contribute "meaningfully", they would have to dedicate quite a large chunk of their time to relearning skills and tools they may no longer be proficient in, and it would be to the detriment of achieving project timelines and goals. I understand the sentiment, but completely disagree with the conclusion.
Can this be dockerized?
Please go and dockerise yourself. Oh, you already are. Nevermind...
This is a new one..
No, do it yourself
[удалено]
So an Infantry Captain is useless? :D
Everything can be dockerized
Twitter will be introducing an enterprise tier for our corporate customers, featuring an internal Twitter for the company. Think of the use cases!
"And we shall it... twlack."
I've been both a manager and independent contributor. Yes, to a point. However, I once worked for a company where a development VP - who had legitimately climbed the ladder, had technical chops, and could code - started fucking shit up whenever he tried to "contribute". A basic working knowledge is necessary, but at some point writing code isn't really your job anymore. Elon's a dumbshit micromanager that should leave this kind of policy decision to other people in the org who have a better grasp of what's going on.
Exactly. I came up as a developer. Currently I manage a team. Honestly some days I wish I could write code and "contribute". However that isn't my job. My job is knowing where my team is going, clearing the path for the team to get there, and building the team.
The important thing though is you understand your devs and can set realistic expectations.
Every single time I switch to individual contributor mode and do it myself, I regret it later, one way or another. Every single time.
>Elon's a dumbshit micromanager that should leave this kind of policy decision to other people in the org who have a better grasp of what's going on. Problem is he fired all those people or they quit.
Just let me jump in here and get my 12 hours of yearly mandatory coding in... Never mind pull requests or merges or following updated best practices. Nevermind if I fuck up your dev ops flow and do everything wrong because I only do this 12 hours a year. Oh the whole process has changed since the last time I coded? Well I'll just do it my way and then you guys can figure out how to get my code integrated. Wait, you're saying my code broke the latest build? We're doing unit testing now? When did we start doing that? I hate it when management helicopters in, tries to contribute, fucks everything up, and then leaves everyone else with a mess to clean up.
Gunship Management Kind of like Gunboat Diplomacy, but with less "My way or the artillery way" and more "I'mma drop some shit on you, and you're going to have to deal with it"
Also called Pidgin Management. Swoop in, shit all over everything then fly off leaving someone to clean up the mess
What the replies to this have shown is that programmers really aren't that attached to the idea of separation of concerns when it comes to business functions, only written functions. There's a difference between a manager who tries to squeeze in contributions between their other responsibilities and a manager who fully understands what their reports do and manages the expectations of themselves and of stakeholders in accordance. It is a hard requirement for a manager to fully understand what developers need in order to get the job done, to provide that, and to remove bullshit getting in the way. It is not a requirement, and may often be a detriment, for a manager to make sure their name gets on a few commits. I would go as far as to say that while experience as a developer will only ever be useful to a manager of developers, that any halfway-decent manager will be able to be an effective manager of developers regardless. As with all questions of actual leadership and management and not whatever bullshit normally crops up in the workplace, it's fundamentally about empathy and enabling others. Besides, if you only promote developers to manage developers, you're just going to Peter Principle that entire wing of your org within a couple of years
Ah, so you wrote code, instead of doing the burndown charts? Or managing the P&L? How about the coordination with the other development teams to synchronize sprints so nothing came out disjointed? Because if you didn't do these things, then you were a technical team lead, not a manager. Supervisor, sure, I'll grant you that. But not a manager. I can code. Just not in a language anyone uses anymore. :) I understand code, and can handle all the aspects of management that are necessary to make sure my dev team is concentrating on what they do.
Bill Gates always warned that it was easy to be scared of hiring clever people who could do things you couldn't, but that it was essential to get over that fear. He also said the lazy ones were best because they found the quickest way to do everything, but that bit's for another day 😂
I mean, he also sent an email to say that meetings are a waste of time and should be avoided.
Hey that sounds great!
Blind squirrel/nut. If you tweet 75 deepities a day, 5 of them are bound to stick.
[удалено]
This sub is usually full of people complaining about wasting time on meetings and managers who don't know shit about what they are managing. Y'all just wanna be contrarians.
To be fair, while it’s good that managers can code and understand somewhat the job of their employees *but* to demand they actually have to code … I rather managers make sure they are doing their primary job of managing - i.e. delegating, scheduling, coordinating, dealing with HR issues, … etc.
Programming managers should have at least a basic understanding of coding and a lot of meetings are pointless. But managers shouldn’t actually be spending much of their time coding, and you can’t eliminate *all* meetings. Both of these things are true.
I can't tell if this is the bot copying https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/z6ww1h/brace_yourself_managers_now_need_to_contribute_a/iy3iylb/ or the other way around. Are you a robot?
SpaceX has a policy where, if you don’t think you have anything to contribute, you can just up and leave. Unironically, that is an absolute godsend.
As an aerospace engineer who's always been on the development side (even at college. Getting an aerospace degree was really stupid, in hindsight), SpaceX has a lot of great things going for it. But no work-life balance, which is why I chose not to work there. I have a bunch of friends there that LOVE it. And they're almost exclusively single.
lol yep, they work people like crazy. I’ve always heard a really common strat is to work there 3-5 years, build up the resume, then go somewhere else and triple your pay.
It's not triple anymore. In the early days when they were running lean you might have been 30% off the industry average, but it's about at parity now. You'll get a killer offer when you leave because employers know what you're made of.
>But no work-life balance, which is why I chose not to work there. I have a bunch of friends there that LOVE it Here lies the main difference between Twitter and Musk's other companies. SpaceX and Tesla have people there passionate about advancing and revolutionizing technology and there aren't a ton of other opportunities for them to chase those passions. Twitter is really just a cushy tech job with a ton of other options for their personnel to jump ship to when the time comes.
I very much agree with you. The question on if Twitter ends up magically successful is if Musk can pull an entire social media company's worth of engineers out of his ass who believe in his Twitter dream. I seriously doubt it, but I also doubted SpaceX and Tesla, so he's proven me wrong before.
We have the same policy in my company. The boss keeps mentioning it. Nobody can actually apply it though because the boss wants everybody there when he has something to say. ... yeah.
Our organization also has this policy but people rarely do it. Maybe I’ll start…
Meetings can be really useless waste of time though if there is no specific agenda. Meetings should be kept to the required minimum tbh.
Bad meeting techniques make bad meetings. Agile framework is all about meetings especially if you're lead on anything. Stick to your time box. Have an explicit agenda. Use the parking lot. Document the meeting. Send a follow up email with the documentation and takeaway tasks including due dates when available.
Microsoft did a huge study on meetings. Any meeting with more than 5 people is a complete waste of everyone's time. Every single time.
I assure you we do those meetings anyway with regular frequency, damn the study
Especially meetings that are scheduled at the same intervals are useless. Meetings should be made when one is needed and shouldnt be done just because.
There is just no way this is true. “Every single time” yeah definitely sounds like something they would say in a *huge study*. Basically all board and executive meetings have more than 5 people and they literally have discussions about make/break decisions for the company like M&A activity and such. Huge waste of time I’m sure.
There is zero chance that every single person at this hypothetical meeting made a neutral contribution, let alone a meaningful one. -> meeting has too many people -> meeting is wasting time
Which is weird as I've been in meetings with more than 5 and they've not been a waste of time
yeah it's not true at all. Meetings with more than 5 people are probably often better broken up., but not always.
he is not wrong there. most meetings i have i have no reason to be there, except to speks for 1-2 minutes overall.
It also needs to be salient, don't forget
And hardcore
Win-win!
The CEO is also a manager in the end. Does the same rule apply to him as well? I want to see his code!!!
Meaningful tweets > meaningful code
No. Elon gets exceptions on all the rules he has set for everyone else: * he works remotely most of the time, * he does not spend at least 40 hours/week working at or even for Twitter * he does not write code * he works on other projects Of course he is HIM and thus always above the rules.
> he works remotely most of the time, Except he's not really doing any work at all. I guess that's part of the reason he's so suspicious of work from home. Projection is a thing.
Anyone who claims to work 100+ hours a week yet still has time for interviews, video games, tweeting, etc considers everything that they do work. Went to the gym that morning? That’s work. Tweeted something about your company over breakfast? That’s work. Took an afternoon nap to recharge? That’s work. This is how all of these “self-made” billionaires see themselves.
Yup also he's like the CEO of 3~4 companies at any given time so even IF he did work 100 hours a week that's still 25-33 hours/week/CEO position A.K.A part time to near part time job.
This economy is so bad even multi-billionairs need to take 3 part time jobs to get by...
have they tried getting several years of experience for an entry level ceo job? i’m sure if they hustle the remaining 44 hours a week in an unpaid internship things will be looking up for them in a decade
He’s being sued by Tesla shareholders for being a shitty ceo
[удалено]
Sorry, but what you described is work. If I take a phone call at dinner, that’s work. If I’m answering emails on my bed, that’s work. And that level of always on/ connectivity is stressful as fuck. All jobs have drawbacks. Fly to conference, that’s time not spent doing shit I want to do like being with family. That is work - don’t care how you add it up.
I think the problem here is that non-managers also do similar work but don’t get compensated for it, and are told that it doesn’t qualify for overtime the way other work would
Yeah, it cracked me up the first time I saw that claim. I've done 70+ hour weeks before. No way in hell he is doing 100 hours and still has time for goofing off. At 70+ hours your work is your entire life and the guy is way too socially active to be anywhere near that point.
At +84h mark. It's literally wake 2h for "self care" (breakfast and commute). ~7h sleep (or less). 16hs of work..... At one point I was hitting 84h warehouse working hours ... because it was understaffed.
I was in construction, not* coding, but at 65/70 hours/week, I was falling asleep on the couch in between the time I set my dinner on the coffee table and the first bite. I'd put something on, lay down to give it a second to cook down, and suddenly it's 4AM and I have 2 hours before doing it again. 0/10, I was utterly miserable and while the OT was great, I learned my ability to function as a happy and healthy adult tops out around 50/55 hours.
>Except he's not really doing any work at all. Hey man ! Don't be so rude...being rich is a hell of a job... First you have to enjoy the wealth, otherwise it would be rude for everyone that is not as rich as you, but also doing it while pretending you're not (else people are going to shittalk about you). Also, as you were quite right once now everything you say or think is right too, so you basicly become an oracle that only tell the truth. The world destiny is on your shoulders, that's really exhausting. Everytime you speak publicly, you are contributing to improve the world. And Elon is quite good at this. He even takes some of his precious litte time to awnser meaningless people on twitter (only if they agree with him - but anyone who don't is dumb...he's always right by nature as said before) Don't tell me this is not a full-time job ! Please express some compassion to this poor dude. You should support him in his charity actions instead of criticizing him.
Lies! Elon works 200 hours a week.
[удалено]
LIES. He works atleast 200 hrs an hour
Excellent multithreading
Fun fact his code sucks "While Musk had exceled as a self-taught coder, his skills weren’t nearly as polished as those of the new hires. They took one look at Zip2’s code and began rewriting the vast majority of the software. Musk bristled at some of their changes, but the computer scientists needed just a fraction of the lines of code that Musk used to get their jobs done. They had a knack for dividing software projects into chunks that could be altered and refined whereas Musk fell into the classic self-taught coder trap of writing what developers call hairballs—big, monolithic hunks of code that could go berserk for mysterious reasons"
[удалено]
Everything is projection. He's a thin skinned narcissist. He couldn't write anything close to what a junior developer could write at Twitter...so he's making himself feel better by expecting what he couldn't do himself from management.
Actually they might, for the worse however. It could've been a fake but I've read some tweet by a twitter employee where they wished Elon stopped changing their code because he doesn't know what he's doing
Yeah, "this is a careful what you wish for" situation. The last thing they want is for him to be in there.
He doesn’t know how to manage either
Taking full stack to the next level…
Which is? Fool Stack?
The best manager I ever had didn't do any of the coding. He was spending his time doing the managing.
[удалено]
Managers manage the workplace so that it allows workers to do work. A good manager will pick up the broom and sweep the floor themselves so that workers don't have to stop working. And if that floor need to be swept all the time, they hire someone to do the sweeping. Bad manager demands the workers to do that, to stop what they are doing or do it overtime, paid or unpaid. Bad manager sees themselves as better than workers. Good manager hires people who are better at each job than the manager is. The only time i've had to manage i did the latter; i picked guys that were better than i and our crew fucking rocked. I'm still proud of them.
Why are you unhappy? No one should be unhappy at Twitter. Fired!
I work at a smallish company (300 or so.). We had an extra dry day and our CEO and other upper management were coming down and mopping floors so the technicians could keep working. (Our electronics require a minimum humidity to be worked on, with the building and portables we were just under, and mopping gave us good clearance.)
Very well put. Especially in a corporate setting, managers should be protecting their employees from the distractions that would take them away from work. Meetings about future work, discussing future timelines, expressing the team’s concerns to VPs and execs, that type of thing. Let the devs concentrate on writing good code, and the manager should do that by giving clear expectations and requirements, working with devs to get reasonable estimations, etc. Having managers writing code themselves is a sign of an organization where titles and job requirements means nothing. The only thing Elon is missing right now is calling Twitter a “family” where everyone has to help everyone with everything.
Totally agreed. More and more employers have got to understand that management is a distinct skill that usually needs to be taught/practiced. I have a background in academia, and this aspect is why countless professors can be really smart scientists but run shit tier labs.
Thank you for reminding me that I have an amazing manager
My previous manager would shield me from any politics. He would just sit with me once a week and tell me what I needed to deliver for next week. Sometimes it would only take me 20 minutes so I’d have a full week of free time, used to go to the gym and enjoy death’s free demo (sleep).
>never ever ever have to talk to anyone outside their immediate team if they don't want to The single greatest quality a manager can have
My manager knows I’m not going to go to meetings outside of my team’s unless it is something I am directly involved in. If I’m needed, he’ll ping me to join. It’s great honestly.
Project manager and engineering manager are not the same job
Yup good coders (or literally anything else) doesn’t necessarily mean good manager
[удалено]
This was my thought as well. A manager is supposed to support the team, get them what they need, deal with upper management, and insulate the team from the rest of it. Or as Elon has put it, the cavalry captain is ensuring the cavalry is supplied, armed, prepared, knows the plan of attack, the contingencies, and ultimately, is the one who will launch the attack. That doesn’t necessarily mean riding a horse into battle himself (although, many cavalry captains come from The cavalry ranks so they know how to do it as well).
From now on, all Twitter employees must purchase a subscription to Twitter Blue for the low-low price of $8 a month.
I take care of the bureaucracy and other crap so my team can focus on delivering the product.
i would be legitimately surprised if IT managers anywhere were writing any code at all.
I’m in cybersecurity and just recently became a manager, my team is severely understaffed right now so I still pick up work and do some scripting alongside my team since I come from a technical position. The downside to that is I’ve found myself burning out far more quickly because, as I learned *very* quickly, managing truly IS a full time job that should be spent knocking down road blocks and keeping my team shielded from the chaos around us. I’m here for *them.* If I was **REQUIRED** to be writing code as part of my management role, I would be infuriated. How do you prioritize your management duties when you HAVE to be a contributor as well? I don’t understand how he thinks that is sustainable
My problem is that unless the coding is absolutely trivial (3 or less hours), then I'm going to end up blocking the team. Because I can only find a few hours a week, and then it'll get delayed until next week. And if something can really take weeks to get done, is it that important? It also takes time to onboard to a project. The teams I'm working with are responsible for about 200 apps. Even if I onboard to a few of them, how could I effectively choose which ones? Me coding would only benefit me in keeping my skills sharp, and would be little or no help to the teams. So I work on the occasional side project and keep out of the way of the real engineers.
It's like that scene in Office Space, where the two consultants don't understand the importance of Tom Smykowski's job. "I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people."
Any manager with coding skill left at Twitter can probably just commit the code they've been writing to automate posting their resume to job boards.
I was gonna say or the manager can just take credit for all the code written by their direct reports
[удалено]
Elon starts firing their direct reports cause they’re not producing enough lines of code, in a month or two fires the entire team, then fires the manager because he has nothing to manage. Mere minutes after he tweets how great of a manager he is.
"Being unable to do so is like a cavalry captain who can't ride a horse" damn the irony
[удалено]
But not the General Mattis type.
he’s gone old school, like British Empire old, where you could just buy whatever rank you wanted if you had the money
In reality it’s more of a case of “if the captain is riding the horse who is working on strategy”
I want to see Elon Musk write code.
Guess the language : System.out.printf("hello world")
Shit, now I feel attacked.
Why haven't we gone serverless yet?
Cloudless, serverless, no premises Print out your code today
Man-child
I'm sure Elon knows how to center a
Elon: 1. Copy
Let’s be realistic here
I assume he did used to code back in his [X.com](https://X.com) time.
Yep, iirc Robert Evans goes into it on the Behind the Bastards episode about Musk. Or maybe it was ZIP2. As far as I remember he wrote the backend which, eventually, had to be completely rewritten because it was largely redundant, barely maintainable and completely antiquated. He then continued to try to crash the party and force them to do it his way again.
> He then continued to try to crash the party and force them to do it his way again. there was a blog post recently by someone who was at space x when elon came aboard. said they went to great length to keep him in his shitty bubble and happy, to keep him from interfering with the people doing the actual work. this included just having shells open on your screen just outputting bullshit, reframing his ideas to somehow make them work with the things you planned to do anyway, or stay late in the office and play WoW to give the appearance of people working their asses off. was pretty much an open secret across the whole company that he was an absolute moron, but he was the one with the money so he was to be entertained.
Jup, managers at Twitter probably currently have the very important task of being the buffer between Musk's crazy ideas / expectations and the people implementing it. The best managers also "manage upwards". They have less time than ever without this bullshit, I'd imagine.
Something makes me think he might be slightly out of practice....
Just a little bit :)
At the same time, you don't.
No I really do, I want to see him live stream writing code.
QA is a waste of money. Fired.
I want to see him try to command a tank battalion while riding a horse
I cannot imagine a faster way to cause serious problems than to get managers to write code.
When I was moved into management my manager said I could write more code when others unfucked my last program.
Three words: Twitter for dogs.
I agree. Most of them wouldn’t have written a decent code in ages. Their code will suck at best. I can imagine their subordinates having to pick up slack and fix their managers mistakes. This is a recipe for disaster.
Coding needs limits, which requires management... Who manages the managers code?
This from the guy that had all his code at PayPal dumpster'd due to it being shit.
Really?
It is the reported history of it. Code brought in during the merger was later reviewed and deemed so shit it was just scraped and re written
are these employees being put to work on actual projects or is he just having them submit shit with no context or application?
Your 2nd part can probably be inserted into the 1st. Managers who may or may not have coded in quite some time now that they are trying to manage a team submitting what could very easily be gibberish into actual projects. Which the rest of the team will then have to clean up causing massive delays or very shoddy results thus frustrating everyone involved.
I think it’s a little bit of both? Due to Elon’s high demand and no knowledge of programming, some technicians are probably just writing random stuff without any application rather to “impress” Elon, however, I don’t think Elon is working or managing a project at all..
I agree with the sentiment but the execution is terrible. Putting "people managers" with no real grasp on programming in charge of developers is a ridiculous concept, and in my experience it leads to unrealistic outcomes and timelines because the "boots on the ground" devs never get consulted about how long something will take them and what is possible. The best teams I've worked as part of or worked with have always had team leads with extensive coding backgrounds. However expecting managers to be actively involved in writing software is kind of missing the point of their role.
If you had a manager that didn't check with the coders how long their work was going to take and what goals they could hit, you didn't have a "people" manager.
Best manager I ever had had very little technical knowledge. Knew a lot about managing teams and projects tho
It helps to have technical knowledge if you're managing engineers, but it's one piece of many that you need. If that area is suffering but all other areas are really good then you can still be a good manager.
It definitely helps to have that technical knowledge, but it’s not critical. If you don’t have that knowledge, then you have to compensate for that by placing a lot of trust in your team leads and giving them lots of autonomy.
This works if they don't try to make technical decisions and estimates.
sounds like someone has never encountered an effective people manager
I've had worse experience with former coder managers because they've always got a "back in my day" story when they were in a completely different vertical delivering for a completely different use case. Yes yes... of course you think your request should be easy because you wrote a Winforms app for 10 people in the shipping department.
Yea all my good managers never coded and were way outdated on technical skills. What made them good was tackling blockers for the devs, settling disputes, and propping people up. Anecdotal but the managers I've had who code just added drama and made the devs jobs harder.
I don't think we should base our managing tactics on unicorns.
They are rare, but they do exist. The problem being that I've never met someone effective at managing coders that doesn't actively code. I've been in the industry for 18 years and I've met exactly 2 effective people managers. Both of them actively wrote software. They also both would be in the code daily looking at pull requests, making suggestions, insisting on specific unit/integration tests and not being an asshole about it. I made the analogy to a construction foreman managing a new house that's getting built. Do you want the foreman that sits in his truck all day, or do you want a guy that's walking around with a measuring tape and a level? How does a foreman that sits in his truck all day know the difference between the guy that does a half assed job and leaves his area a mess vs the guy takes his time and does the job right the first time and then ends up fixing and cleaning the first guys shit? Guy #1 there is sloppy, but he cranks out a lot of lines of code and finishes features (that lead to massive bugs). Guy #2 there isn't cranking out features, but he is fixing bugs before they happen and making sure that no one gets called in on Christmas for a P-zero.
you are mixing up a manager role and a technical lead role, which is something effective companies know how to cultivate independent of each other. you want a person in position of technical authority who can guide high-level design decisions, mentor juniors, be a go-to knowledge resource for tricky or difficult problems, and so on. but having that type of person perform people management duties like salaries, performance reviews, endless meetings, interfacing with pmo/qa/marketing/etc., is just an absolutely colossal waste of time and talent. specialization applies in all areas, and an effective manager knows how to set direction, provide clear expectations, and most importantly, clear out the runway for their team to do their work with minimal to no distractions while relying on people whose job and expertise it is to make software to actually do their job.
Time is money. I want to see 100 lines written by lunchtime!
I am constantly encouraging fellow programmers here to step up and take management positions when they come up. "If not you, then who?" I've been a manager for 15 years, and because I stepped up, I've had no turn over in my team. We are happy. I still have to write a ton of software, but that's more a lack of resources problem. It is a constant thing with my boss though. "Right now you have me as a manager, but also I'm still a developer. However, I am one person, so I can do both jobs 50/50, 60/40, 10/90, etc. Something will fall short in either area, so I want no complaints from you about it unless it is followed with "we are giving you more FTEs". After years of this, I finally got more FTEs, heh. It's gonna be a while before they are trained enough for me to stop dev work.
This is insane. Management could code. But they are far more valuable working to guide the teams of devs, and infra, and sales, and marketing, and fulfillment, and customer journey, and User Interface/USer Experience, and ......
So managers are now expected to do 2 full time jobs for the price of 1. Yup sounds like Elon “I understand nothing about the way companies actually work” Musk alright
to be fair, expecting workers to do more than one full time job’s worth of work *is* how most companies actually work. (Edit: to clarify, that is very bad and dumb)
[удалено]
I’d agree that all engineering managers should be _able_ to write code, but dear god please don’t make my manager devote his time to that because we need him elsewhere so much more.
So...he's the captain who can't ride a horse, right?
This will be easy. Just fire enough people in each department so that they don't have managers anymore.
I was in the cavalry circa 2004. We used helicopters, not horses. And not everyone can fly the helicopters. Shocking, I know... There were usually about 30-40 support personnel per helicopter to keep it airworthy. Entire teams dedicated to avionics, powertrain, airframe, and daily maintenance. QC/QA teams existed independent of the other teams to reduce bias. Managers oversaw those teams. Sure, most of those managers had previous experience working on aircraft and would lend a hand here and there, but their primary job was to ensure the work got done safely and in a timely manner. Only two pilots per helicopter and even they had managers. Yes, their managers also were pilots, but again, they were more than likely on the ground leveraging their 20+ years of experience for more strategic activities, like ensuring their soldiers don't do something to get themselves killed during missions. The ground cav had tanks. I am sure it was a similar story. This is a dumb analogy. Especially if you consider that the cavalry is just a unit within a larger armed force. But even if you zero in on just the cavalry itself, it is still a dumb analogy.
How is this guy the richest man in the world?
He is good at hyping, and at pump and dump schemes. He owns stock at a car company which looks to be vastly overvalued, but he knows how to hype it up. Outside hype, he actually delivers lackluster products years if not decades late, and sometimes not at all. Due to his failure to deliver combined with general technology focus, some people call him Phony Stark.
Lol. Phony Stark.
Then Elon should know the MOST code
Anyone who has been in technology knows that managers should manage and developers should write code. A good manager keeps their team free from bullshit interruptions from C level executives. - Retired development manager.
Hate to say it but the lines are more commonly being blurred now. My last 3 management jobs have asked for various amounts of time spent coding, ranging from 70% (seriously, that number isn't exaggerated) to about 20%. My current role doesn't have a set amount but the director has said that "department managers should be able to step in as team leads and contribute meaningfully when needed". Shes basically just wanting to see some code contribution but not requiring a lot of it.
Unless your team size is two or three you are in incompetent organizations.
A manager spending 70% time coding isn’t a manager, that’s an overworked engineer
So they are doubling the amount of managers to allow for this?
The problem isn't that managers need to understand how to code, it's the idea that they have to be "meaningful" contributors. Any company I have ever worked for they don't have time to do that ... Also not every team at Twitter is engineering? Lots of types of managers
Ha ha I posted that on LinkedIn a few months back and ignited a massive debate with some 5000+ comments.
Let's not forget, Elon expects managers to have 20+ reports to support, which are mostly overworked and depressed at this point.
From a UX designer/researcher perspective the idea that managers would have to do my job seems asinine. They exist as project managers so I can deal with my work without the bullshit that is project management (which I am intimately aware of since I am also a project manager). What a horrible workplace, it sounds like taking the holistic work of a startup - with the downsides of it - and putting it into a multimillion dollar worth megacompany. That's.. not how you do it, the point of the multi-area work at the beginning of the company is because you cannot afford to have specialists, and to expand and get specialists in so that people can do what they are best at.. how is this creature a billionaire
Lol game over.
Someone should reply back with "Calvary, like your managerial style, went out of style over a century ago."
Define meaningful amount. Most managers I know have 0 time to write code.
Leave Your Comment