Handling Management’s Bad Ideas
A software engineer’s guide to deflecting ridiculous ideas with the minimum of fuss and effort.
It comes as no surprise to anyone working in the Grand Game of Software Engineering when they learn, quite quickly, that the vast majority of management operating on the other side completely lack any technical acumen whatsoever.
If anything these days, it’s almost a requirement that to be put in charge of a development team, or important software project, a management drone should have no technical ability at all, but be pretty handy with PowerPoint slide transitions, opening Outlook, and arranging endless daily meetings to shuffle myriads of little bits of coloured paper (all alike) around on some whiteboard or other (that’s long past wishing to go back to its original intended purpose of, like, people writing on it).
Suffice it to say that the decision making process that happens therein is one that doesn’t really have the best interests of anyone at heart — not the customer, not the developers, and certainly not the company’s bottom line.
But, it most definitely has everything to do with the notional manager climbing the greasy pole up and away from dealing with actual worker cogs to spend more time in their office online shopping and ordering better frames for their laminated accreditations.
