Software Management These Days
The Three Stooges have replaced the Roman Centurian
When I was a fresh-out, I had a BOSS. All-caps. Actually I had a series of BOSSes, and they were all amazing. They were first-rate engineers. They were good enough at managing people. They took responsibility for results. They led from the front, and they didn’t ask anything of you that they hadn’t already asked of themselves.
Those days are seemingly gone, at least at large companies. Nowadays, in a typical product development environment, you’ll find a manager (small “m”), a project manager, and some sort technical leadership or architecture type. The developers might respect the technical leadership or they might not. But they sure don’t respect the manager, and they really don’t respect the project manager.
The manager got the job of manager because … nobody is really sure. The manager doesn’t feel the need to be deep in the technical details. Nor does the manager feel the need to manage the project w/r/t calendar time. What does the manager do? Calm the agitated and frustrated developers — who don’t know why they’re so pissed, because they were all born too late to have had a BOSS.
The project manager is non-technical, is technical in some non-applicable field, or was just so bad as a developer that they went into project management. Now they’re proudly non-technical. I’ve met the occasional program manager who is variant of the M*A*S*H character Radar O’Reilly, but that’s a rare occasion. More often the project manager chunks through some process and has zero Spidey-Sense for when the train is about to derail.
The tech-lead might be very good technically, but at the end of the day the tech-lead is a “chicken”. What? There’s an old saying: “The difference between involvement and commitment is like ham and eggs. The chicken is involved; the pig is committed.”
As a team, the manager, project manager and tech-lead don’t add up to the BOSS. 1 + 1 + 1 < 1. So bring in process. Instead of the BOSS waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, you have three management-grade salary draws taking afternoon naps. The results are predictable.
Enough complaining — what needs to change? manager: you need to step-up and get your capital “M” on:
- Own the results — if it doesn’t come in on-budget, on-schedule and solving the customer’s problem, then it’s on you, 100%. This means getting into the details of the requirements and into the risks of the project.
- Own the tech — if a developer gets stuck on a problem, you must be engineer enough to solve it together with them, at least 95% of the time. Call in the help for that 5%, but keep your engineering skills solid. If you never had solid engineering skills, then you need to find a new job. When it comes to critical technical decisions, be the “ham”.
If your project manager can help out as a “Radar”, that’s awesome. If you have solid technical leadership in your crew, that just makes it better. Own the results, own the tech, and be a great leader — BOSS.
