Deliberately Working Behind Management Lines
Is this a valid strategy for a progressive engineer needing some downtime?
Even after all of these long years, decades spent working on designing and executing strategies of play, stepping through other people’s moves, and analysing play after play in the Grand Game I’m still utterly bemused why anyone with an IQ level above that of a common (or rather non-garden) office potted plant would deliberately seek to join the ranks of notional management.
I’ve already written many articles, as you may well know, specifically dealing with how unwitting progressive software engineers can find themselves somehow in the management ranks, waking up like Locutus of Borg with their last memory being of saying “Make it so!” on the bridge of the Enterprise.
This can easily happen by not paying proper attention to what you’re doing in much the same way as you find yourself wearing a cardigan and slippers, drinking milky tea, and leafing through the agile manifesto and starting to nod in a vacant, zombie like fashion.
Equally it can also very easily happen as a result of developer altruism and faux-loyalty (progressive “Bad Faith”) by accidentally accepting a promotion. Most likely because you somehow started to think that “it’s the right thing to do”. This is, of course, never the case as your technical…
