The Private Part of a Self-Important Self-Description

November 24, 2009 3:28 PM

The Virtue of a Manager
posted by blasdelf (31 comments total)

I've noticed that this is in English, and more or less grammatically correct, but I simply don't understand it. Flagged as :-|
posted by turgid dahlia at 3:46 PM on November 24, 2009 [1 favorite]

I've noticed that this is in English, and more or less grammatically correct, but I simply don't understand it.

Oh, good, it's not just me. It really is almost incomprehensible.
posted by Caduceus at 3:49 PM on November 24, 2009

Get a job you two, this was both sardonic and wise concurrently if you speak business.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 3:55 PM on November 24, 2009 [2 favorites]

I do "in fact" concur. Properly. Or is it?
posted by Damienmce at 3:56 PM on November 24, 2009

By far the funniest spot to have a gap at, hence the easiest target for a low blow: try to make jokes about a gap between one’s teeth and you’ll soon be exhausted, but this here is gold.

I speak bidness, and don't get it.
posted by found missing at 3:56 PM on November 24, 2009 [4 favorites]

Get a job you two, this was both sardonic and wise concurrently if you speak business.

I not only speak business, I am fluent in both manager-business dialect and managed-business dialect. This article is borderline gibberish to me.
posted by dersins at 3:58 PM on November 24, 2009 [1 favorite]

I just had my assistant explain it to me and she said it confronts synergistic competitor models going forward so I'm on board, is all.

Oops gotta run, naptime.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 4:06 PM on November 24, 2009 [4 favorites]

Thoughtwise, could we preclude the generation "made of words", by system?
posted by Damienmce at 4:07 PM on November 24, 2009

To contribute to the ongoing pileon:

This guy sounds like he's a Project Manager... their primary management duties is managing the project (their title is not People Manager for a reason), their role is not primarily hiring and firing employees or making quarterly forecasts. While still useful, that should be qualified, as it isn't completely applicable outside of software development.

His points are relevant and interesting, but he reads like a narcissist. Programmers can be narcissistic assholes and succeed, but managers must absolutely not, they have to play politics and use their soft-skills to make sure everyone's happy.
posted by amuseDetachment at 4:07 PM on November 24, 2009 [2 favorites]

I read it as "The Virtue of a Manger," so I was reading it with my "LOLXTIANS" codec, with the "KEEP CHRIST IN CHRISTMAS" subsystem set to 11.
posted by mccarty.tim at 4:19 PM on November 24, 2009 [2 favorites]

Yeah, he's fer sure got a way with words... but this cracked me up:

There’s a naive brain model in the spirit of “the brain has a reptilian part, a mammal part and a human part”. For example, if a student fails to answer a question in an oral exam with his human brain, the mammal brain feels bad about it and complains to the reptilian brain. The reptilian brain then cheerfully replies, “Who’s causing the trouble? Oh, that little guy behind the table? Not to worry - I’ll kill him”. The higher brains then supposedly suppress this - “What do you think this is, reptile - Jurassic Park?”, and the tension is translated into sweating.

Oh noes... my nerd is showing...!
posted by MeatLightning at 4:20 PM on November 24, 2009 [2 favorites]

I had managed to avoid that...
posted by oneswellfoop at 4:34 PM on November 24, 2009

mccarty.tim: I was thinking, "oh no, more Christmas Creep!". And then I saw it was about taking pride in someone else's work, and I kept thinking, "they're hand-building mangers?"

Then I saw the extra "a" and my reality shifted.
posted by hippybear at 4:37 PM on November 24, 2009

He also failed to realize that "Paul Krugman’s exquisite title “The Conscience of a Liberal“" was a riff/response to Barry Goldwater's “The Conscience of a Conservative“, written a long time ago (when some Conservatives had 'em)
posted by oneswellfoop at 4:38 PM on November 24, 2009 [1 favorite]

If you don't understand and enjoy this, you may fall into the subset of those who are not programmers.
posted by localhuman at 4:45 PM on November 24, 2009 [1 favorite]

If you don't understand and enjoy this, you may fall into the subset of those who are not programmers

Or not.
posted by effbot at 4:51 PM on November 24, 2009

$DEITY help me, but I actually knew exactly what he was talking about.

There's huge stress involved when you're held responsible for someone else's productivity. Stuff is always late or fucked up, resources are always short, and employees are infinitely complicated little engines of dysfunction. Decisions need to be made, but there's never enough information or time. It's a challenging juggling act trying to stay on top of all the implications of unending technical compromises while also making sure that all the myriad subtasks get completed somewhat on schedule and turned into a product. In the end, you're doomed to fail on the technical side, and start resorting to random generic contributions like questioning scalability or drawing analogies to some ancient fucking piece of shit system you worked on back in the day when you were relevant.

When you get Peter Principled into management as a prototypical high-level-Aspergersish anal-retentive control-freak team-lead developer, it's quite maddening how helpless managing a team can feel.

Or maybe that's just me.
posted by argh at 5:54 PM on November 24, 2009 [2 favorites]

yeah i don't know what's up with you guys who don't get this: i've been out of the programming game for damn near five years now and this cracked me right up.
posted by johnnybeggs at 5:59 PM on November 24, 2009

I actually knew exactly what he was talking about.

I do *now*, since you explained it in coherent terms, but the way this guy waterboards the English language is pretty amazing.

And I'm with you, even though I'm a programmer and not a manager because:

prototypical high-level-Aspergersish anal-retentive control-freak team-lead developer

my blood pressure goes up just reading that sentence. I'm sick to death of the whole "socially-defective geek" thing. You want to like Star Wars and anime that's totally cool. Basic failures of the social contract, as far as communicating with and respecting others, not so much. Either learn to relate to other human beings or get the fuck away from me and don't work in a team environment ever again.
posted by drjimmy11 at 6:03 PM on November 24, 2009

Wait I kind of misread what you said. You were talking about "high-level-Aspergersish anal-retentive control-freak" getting promoted into management. At any rate, I am sick of horrendous-social-skills people in any capacity.
posted by drjimmy11 at 6:05 PM on November 24, 2009

and *now* I realize maybe you were using those words to describe yourself? in which case I meant no offense. I'm just trying to say I prefer to work with people who have the basic social skills to be respectful of others. and I'll stop now.
posted by drjimmy11 at 6:09 PM on November 24, 2009

I think you need to work on learning to understand social cues and human communication, drjimmy.
posted by mr_roboto at 6:34 PM on November 24, 2009

The principal function of a manager is being the responsible adult.

No, the principal function of a manager is to be older than me, chew gum and spell stuff wrong.
posted by emelenjr at 6:34 PM on November 24, 2009 [1 favorite]

I'm just trying to say I prefer to work with people who have the basic social skills to be respectful of others.

My bad anyway, I meant "high-functioning Aspergers", not "high-level".

In any case, I may be projecting, but I do believe that many very good developers fit that profile and were originally attracted to computers because computers are predictable and follow rules. Someone with high-functioning Aspergers (as I understand it) is likely to be less observant of social subtleties and thus often finds other people rather unpredictable and confusing. This can be quite challenging if this person excels at software development and architecture and being a team lead (mostly managing deliverables), and then gets promoted into management (mostly managing resources). Mix in the lack of hands-on involvement, and it's a recipe for stress.

I'd venture a guess that it took me about 2-3 years of management experience before I started really "reading" non-verbal cues. There were a few rather adversarial "dueling architect" meetings I remember being totally surprised by that in retrospect should have been obvious...
posted by argh at 7:15 PM on November 24, 2009 [1 favorite]

I'm not a developer, but I thought this article, while a little difficult to understand at times, was almost sublimely amusing.

And this observation upthread is just dead-on:

His points are relevant and interesting, but he reads like a narcissist. Programmers can be narcissistic assholes and succeed, but managers must absolutely not, they have to play politics and use their soft-skills to make sure everyone's happy.
posted by KokuRyu at 8:50 PM on November 24, 2009

I had no trouble understanding this, am confused that anyone could find it confusing, and thought it was totally awesome.

Just to throw another data point in there.

He has another essay which is worth reading; The Nomadic Programmer perfectly captures the dynamic of a company making the difficult changeover from startup mode to corporate mode.
posted by ook at 5:20 AM on November 25, 2009

This piece actually motivated me to signup to MF, after a few years of enjoying the community.

I'm unsure what the author intended- the language approaches the incomprehensible PM documents of a fresh MBA- but it left me rolling my eyes.

Another self-aggrandizing piece- 'hey, I drink with MGMT' that reduces to 'Did you know managers are accountable for production?'

His piece on The Nomadic Programmer, as noted above- actually had an interesting idea or two- but this struck me as way too self-congratulatory to take seriously.

MANDATORY CREDENTIALIZATION: Yeah, I work in IT, and yeah, I've managed programmers, and yeah, I've worked for Fortune 100 companies.
posted by mrdaneri at 7:53 AM on November 25, 2009

YOu know what makes me proud? Like disturbingly proud? That I can't make heads or tails of anything being said in here. At. All.
posted by The Whelk at 8:56 AM on November 25, 2009

I do believe that many very good developers fit that profile and were originally attracted to computers because computers are predictable and follow rules.

That might be why they got into computers, but it's a bad reason to make it a career because most computer work is collaborative. This means you need to communicate with other engineers directly, but you also have to deal with their code (and boards and chips).

Writing BASIC and 6502 assembly for an Atari was glorious determinism. If there were bugs in the GTIA, ANTIC and POKEY or the shadow-register-copying code, I never found them.

I found a few bugs in a C compiler I dealt with in 1989, but the early years were gloriously free of wacky behaviour.

In my last job, while re-engineering a bunch of code written by imaging scientists into a modern RTOS environment, we repeatedly ran into code of which we asked "how did this ever work?"

Now I work with people who have design chops, but due to time pressure, make mistakes at all levels. ASIC bugs are the worst. Things that work fine unless there's too much noise into a cable TV tuner, causing the graphics configuration to get stomped. There's a constant push to get to the "root cause" of problems because you can make them go away without understanding what caused them in the first place. Discovering that someone else didn't actually persist in finding root cause and a bandaid over a patch over a kludge over a workaround worked fine until you do something with the system that wasn't anticipated, but is now considered vital by people who matter.

The systems (mostly) aren't really non-deterministic, but they're so large that they can start to feel like it. You can try to pick a module, unit-test it in isolation and prove it does what it should, but usually 1) there are people asking about other issues that make scientific testing (logging stimulus and response) hard to focus on 2) even if an isolated piece works as it should, there might be undesired effects on code it works with like they expect your piece to have a side-effect or operate faster or slower and 3) as soon as it works, someone wants it do more.
posted by morganw at 8:57 AM on November 25, 2009

Something is probably being communicated here, but the folks in this thread are communicating it more concisely and understandably than the communicator himself, who has chosen to bury his points beneath a barrage of rapid-fire aphoristic banter and smart-alecky non-sequiturs.
posted by blucevalo at 9:40 AM on November 25, 2009

This is good.
posted by limeonaire at 5:37 PM on November 25, 2009