Managers Should Be Technical!
Elon Musk correctly named the non-technical elephant in the room.
Working with a disparate group of other people is difficult at the best of times — what with their variously different backgrounds, ideologies, and surprisingly large amounts of baggage (especially when you start to get to know them), it’s a wonder the whole world isn’t a smoking ruin¹ by now.
Working with other software engineers, however, very significantly takes things up a notch². The idiom, and I love idioms as you probably know, ‘herding cats’ is often used to describe the process of organising or, and I’m reluctant to use the phrase because of its negative connotations, managing software engineers.
Although we tend, mostly, to come from similar backgrounds — hours spent in darkened rooms, the consumption of endless unhealthy yet tasty and easy to prepare snacks, and have a general aversion to physical exercise unless it involves a day trip to the Apple Store — our ideologies and baggage are considerably different to those of people populating other industries.
This produces an enormous amount of friction when it comes to managing a software engineering team, division, or indeed a whole organisation.
