Satyen Rai
Jul 10, 2017 · 2 min read

If you don’t have a clue about what your team is doing, what exactly are you doing managing it in the first place? As a manager of a highly technical team, you need to understand what the day to day jargon means. Your team will not be happy having to dumb it down for you in every conversation. Imagine being a tour guide for a group of tourists whose language you don’t understand – you may be able to use sign language, but your clients are not going to be happy. . .

Most of this article is about stereotypes – refactoring is about wasting time, a generic solution is creating a bigger problem, future proofing is believing in fairies. . . It is true that these terms can at times be used to fool people, but they don’t have to be. And you need to understand what they actually mean in the first place to decide whether they are being used to fool you.

Remember this – if your team believes that you don’t really trust them – and they will if you use anything described here – they will get frustrated. That is never a good thing. Try and build a bit of trust – learn the language they use to communicate.

Remember this – your team is likely smarter than you. They will come up with measures to get around any technique you use to “detect bullshit.”

There is no faster way to lose the respect of a group of highly technical people than calling bullshit without actually understanding what they are doing – or making them dumb down their work so you can understand it.

Finally, if you don’t understand what your team is doing, there is no way to maintain meritocracy. There will always be some who will learn to communicate with you more effectively than the rest – they will end up being rewarded unfairly. Imagine the feeling of achieving something incredible only for your manager to ignore you because (s)he couldn’t understand the enormity of what you did while someone who has no clue what they are doing getting praises heaped on them because they learnt to be the yes man.

You are left with only two solutions:

  • Do something more suited to your skills – spare your team the agony of having to deal with you on a daily basis.
  • Learn to communicate with your team without having to make sweeping statements like those in the article. Learn the jargon that is used on a daily basis – maybe get some hands on experience with the project if you can.

My own Internal Bullshit Detection Meter(TM) is dangerously close to the Complete and Utter Bullshit threshold for this article.

To clarify, I am not saying the questions in the article shouldn’t be raised, but they should be raised by someone who is competent enough to actually understand the answer.

Cheers!

    Satyen Rai

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    Technology Enthusiast, Engineer, Foodie, Wanderer, Gamer, Cricket Fan...