Fake It Until You Break It: The End Of Non-Technical Managers In Software Engineering Dawns
Posted by derjanni@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 184 comments
jduartedj@reddit
Worked under a non-technical manager for about 2 years and it was genuinely painful. Not because he was dumb or anything, he was actually really good at the people side. But when it came to estimating work or understanding why something was blocked, there was always this translation layer that slowed everything down.
The real problem is when they try to compensate by micromanaging velocity metrics or story points instead of just... trusting the team. You end up gaming the system instead of building good software.
That said I've also worked with technical managers who were terrible at the actual management part, so its not like having a CS degree automatically makes you a good lead. The best managers I've had understood just enough tech to ask the right questions but focused their energy on removing blockers and shielding the team from politics.
menckenjr@reddit
+1000
jduartedj@reddit
Right? Its wild how rare that combo actually is though. Most places either promote their best engineer (who hates managing) or hire a people person who cant tell a microservice from a monolith. Finding someone who genuienly bridges both worlds is like finding a unicorn lol
menckenjr@reddit
Once upon a long time ago I did the management thing (8 developers in a small VAR) and my day was spent roughly in thirds - coding, chasing HR and payroll issues for my team and acting as a meat shield to keep the executives out of my team's hair.
jduartedj@reddit
Honestly the "meat shield" part is what got me. Thats literally the most underrated skill a manager can have and most people dont even realize theyre doing it until theyre gone and suddenly the team is getting pulled into every exec meeting about roadmap priorites.
That thirds split sounds exhausting though... coding AND dealing with HR AND playing defense? I feel like most people burn out just doing one of those well. The fact that you managed all three says a lot, thats exactly the kind of manager developers actually respect even if the company never fully appreciated it.
burgonies@reddit
Engineers don't want to be product owners or scum masters or any of that shit. You want to pay $200k for paper pusher?
Sigmatics@reddit
Do managers really earn less than engineers?
Nooberling@reddit
Hahahahahahahahahahahahah.
Never, ever, ever gonna happen. "I talk to the customers. The engineers don't talk to the customers. I talk to the customers, and then bring the specs to the engineers."
That guy, he's useful. To management, he's more useful than the engineers. Cheaper too.
bi-bingbongbongbing@reddit
It's cause the top of businesses don't understand software. They don't value engineers. They just see expensive nerds tapping at glorified word processors. I'm convinced many businesses resent engineers. They are an expense. They take time to do things. "We already know what we want, why is it taking so long?" Etc.
Side note cause I'm spirally after a shitty day - I hate my job. I'd bail from the industry and retrain if there was hope any other job could buy me a house one day. I love engineering. I hate businesses. How can management be so consistently monumentally stupid? I thought I could do this forever at university.
Nooberling@reddit
It's hard to retrain, but union skilled labor jobs are almost as good as software developer jobs. Developers should have unionized in the US decades ago, but the deunionization push in the eighties really messed up the entire country.
bi-bingbongbongbing@reddit
Not in the UK.
Individual_Laugh1335@reddit
Comparatively what has the UK innovated on for tech that employs SWE? Their major source of tech jobs are from backdoor deals companies make with the EU that basically say “if you relax on fining us we’ll put a satellite office in X country”. If AI is as impactful as some theorize then the EU will be dead in the water due to all the regulations they’ve already put in place which, in this theorized case, would be an heavy detriment to overcome.
alex206@reddit
GoldenEye 64
GentlemanBeggar54@reddit
The World Wide Web.
Individual_Laugh1335@reddit
The US built TCP/IP protocols which the WWW built on. Regardless, you have to go back to the 1960s to prove your point.
ern0plus4@reddit
Just sitting behind the computer and staring at the monitor - is it a real work? I do the same, doomscrolling Facebook all the day, and I don't call it work!
vips7L@reddit
I hate everything to do with software engineering anymore too. I got promoted to staff engineer and have to spend all my time reviewing slop from either my coworkers or from their llm of choice, all the while waiting for when they want to lay us all off for code generation or want to reduce our salaries to pay for the slop machines. I spent 5 hours in meetings last week discussing something I could have just implemented in 45 minutes by hand.
I don't know how much longer I can do this shit. I want to bail too, but nothing else pays as much. Even real engineers seem to get paid less and that comes with 4 more years of schooling and debt.
PeachScary413@reddit
Try to go for embedded development if possible. The slop seems less tolerated there and people are more careful about pushing crap (because you might actually physically destroy something)
Plank_With_A_Nail_In@reddit
You have one of the best jobs in all human history. Without a business there would be no one setting you any engineering challenges to solve.
Perfect-Campaign9551@reddit
Would you just stop with this Often-Repeated Reddit Nonsense? It's always the same comment "you're a cost center" BLAH BLAH BLAH. Well then I guess all of humanity is a cost center because we are ALL employees of someone (almost all of us) . Nothing special about engineering there.
It's not clever, it's a tired take with zero proof.
SecretaryAntique8603@reddit
It’s because the initiative comes from elsewhere. The ideas and decision making are driven by the execs or Product. From their perspective engineering is just a stop on the way from Product to Sales with a bunch of know-it-all’s asking annoying questions and “causing” delays.
In their perception, it’s the remarkable “insights” like “what if we were to redesign the app to increase conversion rate?” that generate profits. All you need is a brilliant corporate strategy like “what if we were to expand from B2C to B2B” and then the rest just kind of happens by throwing money at engineering.
Now imagine all you needed was that half-baked idea? That’s the world an executive occupies, I doubt they would miss engineering if they could just tell Claude to do it instead of the engineering director.
RoosterBrewster@reddit
I could see them looking at the budget sheet and always thinking, "damn, why do we have to pay so much for these damn engineers".
One_Curious_Cats@reddit
That move is such a gem.
" I already told you, I deal with the godamn customer so the engineers don't have to.
I have people skills. I am good at dealing with people can't you understand that?
What the hell is wrong with you people?"
Caffeine_Monster@reddit
Ah, the magical entropy unicorn between the engineer and the customer.
Unless the middleman is actively fixing issues in the spec (which usually requires some technical competency) then they are a waste of air. Way to common to see broken and underspecified specs just get dumped on engineers.
KikoSoujirou@reddit
You like standup? Cool, you now have more status calls, along with grooming, decomp, sprint planning, demo, all hands/org meetings, need to stay up to date on cross teams stories, announcements, patching, vulnerabilities etc. Your total hands on keyboard coding time has been reduced to 1-2hours a day, the rest is meetings.
Guvante@reddit
Having someone to placate the customer and stall until the Engineer responds is valuable.
What isn't valuable is just saying yes to the customer and throwing the Engineer under the bus if they disagree.
But having someone the customer can call without bothering the Engineer isn't fundamentally a bad idea.
reluctant_deity@reddit
In my shop at a large org, the BA's talk to the clients.
mtranda@reddit
I was gonna' say this, the layer between engineering and clients are Business Analysts.
And frankly, some of the BAs I've worked with were worth their weight in gold. Nowadays less and less importance is given to BA and it fucking shows.
avast_ye_scoundrels@reddit
I literally had to start my own shop to get around the middlemen and deliver value to clients. WILD difference in success and customer satisfaction.
The frustration you’re describing was a huge part of my motivation to go through the time and trouble to go out on my own. It was time. It was trouble. And expensive, stupid mistakes were part of the package too, early days.
I actually had a C-level at my last job tell me that I’m probably not well suited to client services work. After more than a decade on the field. Wow.
A week later a client I worked with years ago (before I quit that job because it was awful for the same reasons) hunts me down and calls me up. They wanted an honest and competent technical broker for their website.
All told, they ditched my other awful boss from the old job, and we’re getting great things done now. Scoped sprints. Regular releases. Daily Communication.
I think this tells a pretty clear story about the difference in quality and experience for the customer:
Fake-it-till-you-make-it CEOs want to get rich quick selling development services, executed behind a dark curtain, and let the nerds sort it out. PMs keep overeager developers on a leash to keep things from getting “overcomplicated” while drawing up infeasible plans and promises.
Software Engineers are expert planners, communicators and project managers when at the top of our game. Timely, quality delivery isn’t a business goal to us, it’s a reflection on our value as professionals.
jandkas@reddit
As an IC I don’t want to talk to customers or deal with their industry specific needs
RelativeYouth@reddit
As an IC, my non-technical manager tells the customer whatever they want with no grip on the reality of the current product actually built. If they’re going to be worse than useless I might as well be in the room
yxhuvud@reddit
Not necessarily technical competence, domain competence can work just as well.
doomsday71210@reddit
I always loved the irony of him claiming to be a people person while immediately ranting at the first question of what he does
hobbykitjr@reddit
I'm a people person damnit!
q---p@reddit
Didn't you get the memo?
bytelines@reddit
What... what would you say... you do here?
Skizm@reddit
I mean most (all?) FAANG managers have to do coding tests and are expected to be able to participate in technical discussions.
InsertOffensiveWord@reddit
Right? That’s totally the industry standard in the bay area. I can’t imagine reporting to my PM as my people manager.
Nooberling@reddit
I'd say that was the exception rather than the rule. Non-technical managers are much cheaper and easier to train / locate. Yes, it's better to have technical managers, but good technical managers are more rare.
def-pri-pub@reddit
In a few places, I've been the last stop before something is handed to a customer. The amount of times I've not been allowed to talk to a customer about a requirement/bug/feature is staggering. Most often than not for me many PMs/POs have never given me proper design and requirements document.
Scottz0rz@reddit
Hm? Am I missing the joke or did you miss the satirical point of the Bobs? There's kind of a few layers to my understanding.
They were expensive efficiency consultants who laid off the guy most paranoid about layoffs who had a critical role communicating specs between customers and engineers. He was so paranoid about how to avoid layoffs and yet bam, gone.
Also the fact that the aforementioned guy whose job it is to communicate fumbled communicating his value to the people laying him off.
They also laid off a bunch of employees doing actual work, like Samir and Michael, but thought Peter was a straight-shooter with upper-management written all over him when he was straight-up slacking off doing nothing.
At the same time, Peter did do a great job at speaking his mind and telling them about the top-heavy organization with a bunch of middle managers. He spoke honestly because he didn't care about any negative consequences, and his confidence helped him a lot.
So the Bobs were right and wrong on various points, but maybe not for the right reasons for each thing.
It's a great movie.
KevinCarbonara@reddit
You're missing the joke. Screaming, "I'm good with people, why can't you understand that?" proves he is not good with people.
Scottz0rz@reddit
No, I said that. It's multiple jokes.
His job is really important, but the Bobs thought his job was pointless. They asked "why can't the engineers just talk to the customers" which is the most insane shit ever that any reasonable person in the industry would know is insane and made me laugh when hearing it.
He knows this is true, and tried to explain it, but since he was nervous and super sweaty, he got heated and garbled words. He says he's good at communication and he messed up communicating.
Him being worried about getting laid off made him get laid off with his melt down.
cinyar@reddit
"...let's go see the engineers, shall we?"
Nooberling@reddit
You have a point. The joke is actually really multilayered there.
I still can't imagine him getting laid off instead of them using him to outsource the engineers. Guess I'm just old and jaded.
7h4tguy@reddit
Spoken like a true PM who thinks they have "people skills"
Nicholot@reddit
Until now I've never appreciated how layered that joke is. There's also the additional layer that the company hired two efficiency consultants to do the same job lol
fuddlesworth@reddit
I've worked in places like this.
Smallpaul@reddit
The end dawns? I’m going to have a challenge getting past that title.
SmoothOpawriter@reddit
Yeah, it’s not new, I’m a highly technical contributor being managed by non technical executives and it’s a non stop uphill battle for not letting then make absurd self-handicapping decisions all of the damn time.
ern0plus4@reddit
If I make a mistake as a sw eng, causing some extra days of work to fix it myself: everyone tilts their heads, well, well, be more cautious next time, dude, don't waste resources!
If my PM makes a mistake, and turns out that the module what 5 people were working for 2 months is unnecessary, and we should throw it out on the window: no one blinks. (Non-fictional situation.)
Main-Drag-4975@reddit
Im12AndWatIsThis@reddit
In the past I had a technical manager leave the team to be replaced with a non-technical manager hired from outside the company. It was absolutely the worst role I've had to deal with, especially when they would try to steer technical decisions as if they knew the project they didn't touch better than the experienced ICs they managed.
I understand leadership's role in needing to steer a project but this was way beyond such. They would not accept feedback and I ended up communicating with my skip level manager at the time over talking to this person.
I literally left the team and project over this manager. The mental toll was too much and I attribute to it a large reason I ended up leaving the company entirely even after switching teams.
SmoothOpawriter@reddit
This is the exact situation I’m in. I had an awesome job designing medical device hardware and embedded software - we had a no-nonsense CTO to whom I was reporting with an entire career in the same field and a wealth of knowledge / experience. I was under him leading a technical team in designing our company products. He retired and the CEO put his private equity buddy in place - no technical background, no idea how device design works, all he cares about it timelines and cost. At the same time he’s making contradictory decisions, keeping information siloed and generally creating a toxic environment without a clear path forward. It quickly went to the best job I’ve had to the worst. The only reason I haven’t left is that I genuinely feel that I’m helping keep the company together and helping people I care about stay employed. It’s honestly a nightmare.
redblack_tree@reddit
You are not alone. I'm the highest ranked technical person in my non tech company (that contributes, my boss is very strong but is a manager these days).
They are making 7 figures decisions on a software I haven't even seen, let alone evaluate. This is a custom, in house developed software, so nothing I can check by myself. And when I say they are making that project is already being implemented. Those fuckers are spending millions without anyone on the technical team taking a look.
jkubic@reddit
Only 50% you’re lucky -__-
iamapizza@reddit
Luxury.
_tolm_@reddit
“Requirements? You had requirements?! Pah! We had to look f’ requirements under sheet o’ tarpaulin in ‘t middle ‘ut road. And our ~~father~~ manager would beat us to sleep with some high-level initiatives … IF WE WERE LUCKY!”
zeruch@reddit
The article isn't terribly good either. It reads very uncanny valley.
redblack_tree@reddit
It's a very long ass rant about non technical people in SWE teams, especially leading them.
He misses one key point in all that rant, all those jobs exist because no company can afford to use their very expensive SWE for trivial but necessary tasks.
Imagine getting your staff engineer organizing scrums or handling devops boards. It's a monumental waste.
ElGuaco@reddit
So why do they pay managers more than than engineers?
Sage2050@reddit
The whole world is still stuck in the past where moving people managing was the goal of every ic. Surely if you're good at the job you'll also be good at telling people how to do the job, right?
varinator@reddit
Once you hit 40, you look around and you see very few swe your age or above your age and you start twitching a bit.. my point is - I just reached 40 and even with my 15+ years of experience, I know it will ne hard to find a job if I have to leave the current one unless i move onto managing. I love coding but I love my wife and daughter having food to eat and warm house a lot more.
EveryQuantityEver@reddit
I’m over 40 looking to change jobs soon, and I haven’t found it that difficult. The hardest part has been finding places that don’t want to make me relocate
who_am_i_to_say_so@reddit
I swore to stay on the technical path some years ago. No regrets but it is difficult.
I hit the proverbial reset button and upskill every few years to keep up with the cool kids, but admit it’s a little harder now pushing 50. I imagine I’ll be ready to retire when the drive leaves (and the money accounts are brimming).
CherryLongjump1989@reddit
This is not evidenced in salary data though, or even in the average age of workers.
Yuzumi@reddit
Even if I could be good at being a manager I would hate every second of it.
I didn't even enjoy taking over an end game group I was in in Final Fantasy XI. The only reason I did was I was able to convince some others to be co-leaders, so that not everything would fall on me. I don't even think I did a bad job, but it was still a lot of stress and pressure I would just rather not deal with.
I want nothing to do with a position where things actually matter
Ecksters@reddit
With non-technical managers I think it's quite common for the engineers they manage to be higher paid.
ern0plus4@reddit
You misspelled it, instead if "quite common", you wanted to write "extremly rare".
CherryLongjump1989@reddit
It’s common for engineers and managers to be on the same pay scale. So there will be staff engineers that are on the same level as a senior manager or director who end up working closely with non-technical line managers to oversee the technical work. Occasionally, the staff engineer will report to the line manager, in which case it means they are earning more than their manager.
rickyman20@reddit
No, it really is quite common, especially if they have anyone staff or above. Not all their employees, but definitely some
RationalDialog@reddit
In the US maybe, rest of the world?
max_mou@reddit
Also true. I am an EM (prev. SWE) and I am not the highest paid in my team. It was a lateral move instead of a promotion.
micosoft@reddit
I have managed and know plenty of situations where IC’e got paid more than their manager. Not a given. Also the most common scenario is that the manager was technical. Technical skills depreciate quickly while soft/managerial skills tend to be durable.
danstermeister@reddit
Responsibility. A throat to choke (hold responsible)
mllv1@reddit
They don’t
redblack_tree@reddit
Because managers are supposed to be seasoned professionals with tons of experience in the field.
In tech companies, there are two career paths, administrative and technical. Staff and high level engineers can easily make more than middle level managers.
Other than that, outdated practices.
diplofocus_@reddit
To prevent collusion with engineers
AlternativeNo4786@reddit
Not just that, many software engineers are in no way suited to management.
I have two guys who are fantastic, who go fishing after work, but if I leave them to work with each other it’s world war 3
redblack_tree@reddit
Nobody said that dealing with engineers was easy, haha. I know as a fact sometimes I'm a PITA and have issues "watering down" information for non technical stakeholders.
I would daresay most engineers are not well suited for management, the profession requires certain mindset usually not compatible with management soft skills.
GhostPilotdev@reddit
The irony is that the non-technical manager role exists because someone decided engineers should not be trusted to organise themselves.
RationalDialog@reddit
True but that job can be done by a not so good engineer that has some technical understanding and that is not the manager of the others.
ImNotHere2023@reddit
Terrible take - it's never profitable to have incompetent people "leading" competent ones. Also, at major tech companies, engineering managers make just as much as SWEs, so it's not a cost savings.
I've seen the issue much more prominently at companies that aren't pure tech - where there are people who may have domain knowledge but aren't technical. Often the domain knowledge isn't even that difficult, it's just not well documented, so companies incorrectly balance the value of people who happen to have worked in whatever role to acquire the "secret" knowledge vs hiring smarter people and paying the cost of knowledge transfer.
boofaceleemz@reddit
I might be privileged saying this given that my leads and managers have always been pretty technically knowledgeable, so I’ve usually gotten the best of both worlds, but managing is a really different skill set than software engineering. I really noticed when I was led by people lacking management skills.
If someone doesn’t know how to advocate for your team, get your needs met, get your issues addressed, and move your concerns up the chain to people who can make decisions based on them, then your team will suffer. It’s nice to have both skill sets, but I’d rather have a manager who can manage if I’ve got to choose. As long as they know how to honestly listen (and the rest of the team knows how to effectively communicate) then we can work around any technical deficiencies they’ve got.
When people talk about non-technical managers who won’t listen to their people, those aren’t good managers. Wouldn’t matter if they had more technical knowledge or not, they’d always be bad leaders because not listening to your experts will bite you eventually anyway.
redblack_tree@reddit
We live in a big world with all sorts of organizations and companies. Software and automation is so critical these days that most companies have in-house teams (even if it's a single guy).
Experience will vary a lot, from region/country/industry/org quality, etc. You can see it in our comments on this thread, all techie people ranting away.
DerSchattenJager@reddit
Yeah, imagine…wait, most devs don’t have to do that stuff? Shit, sometimes I’m the tech lead AND the Scrum Master.
redblack_tree@reddit
Me too, but unless you are in a very small org, you usually have analysts and/or scrum masters, PM, BSA, BRM, QA, etc.
Yuzumi@reddit
I think this is the real crux though. I think having non-technical people to do the paperwork or whatever is fine, but they shouldn't be the ones making technical decisions. That should always go to some kind of tech lead.
But that inherently has it's own issues as a lot of technical people don't want to be in management in general for one reason or another. I know that personally I would get stressed out over it and wouldn't enjoy that kind of work. Even knowing that not moving up to management "limits" my career I want nothing to do with it. Just give me tasks and I will do them.
mypetocean@reddit
Your butt is an uncanny valley
thabc@reddit
The first sentence isn't any better:
Verb tense all over the place, and who is challenges?
mikeblas@reddit
What is a software engineering dawn?
Obvious-Hunt19@reddit
The rest of it is gibberish too
TheGRS@reddit
It’s the introduction of the epilogue
examinedliving@reddit
The dawn of a new night is upon us
fukijama@reddit
Hahha yep fake the title and break my focus
joe-knows-nothing@reddit
Good band name or album, tho
Buttleston@reddit
title of my sex tape
ThrowawayOldCouch@reddit
I thought that was "The End Dongs".
DeezNeezuts@reddit
It’s a moo point
Fyren-1131@reddit
Non-technical managers have been by far my best experience with managers in IT. We, the engineering team, perform the work we are hired to do, and the managers handle purely the staffing side and the strategic direction without getting in our way with micromanagement.
watduhdamhell@reddit
The strategic direction is kind of the whole deal though... How can a non technical person be expected to have good strategic vision or ideas leading a technical department? They can't. Maybe sometimes they get lucky, sometimes they tank the team.
And that's who this article is about. Personally, I am one of those poor souls doing lots of technical work with a non technical manager and I fucking hate it. "I don't see how this improves things." Right... because you fucking can't! You literally don't know how this changes thing for us for the better, but are stonewalling my project funding because you "don't understand" the value. Holy shit. Literally the worst managers.
The absolute best managers are technical but never micromanage, choosing instead to sit on the bench and do everything you said, HR stuff, admin stuff, and strategic stuff, clearing the way for us, with the ability to HELP us with super smart senior knowledge when needed and get the project in the right direction.
CroakerBC@reddit
Not for nothing, as someone who dips in and out of being a relatively non-technical manager:
Sometimes you start off as a technical manager! Then you spend five or ten years running teams, and now your technical knowledge is about as recent as COBOL, but your organisational and personnel and business process knowledge is sharp. Now you're a non-technical manager!
Sometimes, your technical staff are busy being amazing, and don't want to be managers.
Sometimes someone makes the career path for your technical folks dependent on people management. This both throttles progression for technical staff (you only need so many managers) and means that the person who is the manager may come in due to their technical skills, and be horrible at actual management. I've seen so many shit hot developers become...less than amazing EM's.
The technical part is the least interesting part of the role and also the part that ages fastest compared to your technical peers in IC roles.
whatihear@reddit
Actually being capable of writing code is not important. Knowing the kinds of things that are feasible to do, having a general sense of how long it should take, and understanding why sometimes changing a field in a web form takes 3 months to do properly are what a good manager needs. Those aren't the kind of things that degrade with time if you're actively being an EM. Non-technical people can even learn them, but it's very rare that they ever reach the point of getting it in the way that someone who had programmed for a living does naturally.
watduhdamhell@reddit
Hey, I don't disagree, and I don't mean to throw shade at everyone. Your comment is actually super illuminating because I do have a manager I like that is technical but rusty- he knows the company bs and helps me navigate it like a champ, but I surprise him with the current state of the art. I think he is exactly who you described- a trucnical manager who is now non-technical. To be clear, I would consider him a technical manager, so I suppose it comes down to definitions for me.
I mean, if you are in charge of the "making widgets" department, what I'm saying is at a bare fucking minimum, you have made some widgets before. Maybe not the most up to date widgets, or the ones with the latest and greatest tech. But you have done it. You have insight. You know the struggle, the pain, and what it takes to get it done, and you know what "good" looks like. You can nudge and remove barriers for the team effectively because you know the barriers to remove.
In my mind, a non technical manager is the manager placed in charge of the "making widgets" department who has only ever made whats-its. They are a senior "making whats-its" employee who has been with the company for a while and has now been promoted to the "making widgets" department, for some God damn reason, harping on all the wrong things, cooking up misguided project ideas, improperly allocating resources, etc. all because they have never, ever, made a widget, not once in their life. But they are in charge of that department?
Anyway. I feel you!
Fyren-1131@reddit
A good manager does not dictate the direction based on their own personal technical experience. They have functional/solutions architects, staff/lead engineers and engineers for that.
If you have to go to your manager for implementation advice or engineering guidance, i'd say that's almost a resource problem. In my experience there will almost always be a more senior developer, a lead dev, a technical or functional architect you could be asking. But the managers are managing from the staffing and strategic direction based on the informed input of the team they manage, which are comprised of educated people working with what they're good with.
I wholly disagree that the best managers have to be technical; if they've built a solid team, there's absolutely no need for their presence as a technical person. After all - why would there be? You need a manager, you get a solid manager. You need a developer, so you get a solid developer. A developer-manager sounds weird to me, but I only have my own subjective experience.
And I must also admit I only have enterprise experience, not startup. My managers calendar is is full almost every day. I can't even imagine how he'd find the time to stay up to date on the specifics of what we do.
watduhdamhell@reddit
I have only worked for fortune 100 companies (with the smallest one being headcount of 35k) and I totally disagree. At one of these companies we had an absolutely stellar engineering team and a manager who... Had absolutely no experience whatsoever doing the very specific thing we do- and we all hated them. They were literally a space filler. I mean that's what you're describing. A space filler. So I completely disagree that you should not have any technical chops if you are in charge of a technical department. I have just never seen the case where you have a solid manager who actually is successful who doesn't understand the product or system they are managing with their team, and in fact, only the opposite: the absolute best managers are the ones who actually know their stuff but now sit on the bench. I'm not saying they have to know the current state of the art. I'm saying they have to know the art to some degree. Unfortunately, a lot of middle and upper managers don't have any connection at all to the department they are in charge of and lots of companies, especially the largest ones.
Fyren-1131@reddit
In that case, I'm a bit more on board with what you're saying.
Our manager understands the basics of what we do, but if I sat him down for a code review on my current feature branch he'd blank out and say "this is your field, I trust your judgment". So he absolutely understands our different solutions and where they lie in the overall architecture, but he will not be good at the specifics. But in addition to managing our team of 18 people, he handles two other teams of similar size and different function (2 dev teams, 1 security team).
I guess I'm just a lot more used to there being a lot of politics that falls on the managers. I've worked at companies before where 6-9 months after the fact our manager would shock us with horror stories of how she had to literally defend our existence three times over to have the powers-that-be understand that we weren't as easily replaced as they thought.
roman030@reddit
why is it that developers always think they are the only people who know what they're doing? strategy/vision/ideas are not skills you acquire through a technical background. someone is supposed to have an idea what to build and that requires thinking beyond the "how".
one other thing, if you are not capable of explaining how a technical change "improves things" to a non technical person then you're not very good either.
ptoki@reddit
You are mixing good/poor managers with technical/non technical managers.
Its as frequent to have poor technical manager telling you what to do technically as poor team doing stupid shit and manager telling them to do a decent job.
I have seen the latter more often unfortunately.
Vermathorax@reddit
I agree, my current manager completely changed my opinion on non-technical managers. Turns out all the other ones were shit. And if you are good at managing, it doesn’t matter how technical you are.
bonerb0ys@reddit
Do People that hate management want to do all that bullshit themselves?
Ahhhhrg@reddit
That’s my experience as well, non-technical managers have been the best since their skill has been managing, whereas technical managers are technical first, and managers second (or third, fourth…).
Of course crap managers are crap regardless, but that’s a different topic.
maikuxblade@reddit
About that last part…
lppedd@reddit
Micromanaging is a path most managers go through. Real managers listen to feedback and change trajectory.
ltdanimal@reddit
This is completely wrong. You are going to have OPPOSITE happen. It's the end of anyone that has gotten by on being super technical but not a great communicator or manager.
Why the hell would chopping off all the deep tech/coding knowledge value mean non-tech are done for.
We're going to have less employed people in tech in general and the ones that aren't technical will be able to vibe the shit out of whatever.
The bar to do that stuff is massively lower.
Dean_Roddey@reddit
If you are working at the McDonalds level of software that may be true. No one is going to be vibe coding the kind of stuff I work on. And of course even the McDonalds level AI slop will be full of bugs and security holes.
Bakoro@reddit
If your people have access to the Internet, something is getting vibe coded.
I straight up don't believe there is a place that doesn't have at least a little going on, unless the Internet is locked up tight.
The corporation I work for is doing some of the most complicated, hard sciences stuff on the planet, and we vide code the shit of of anything we can get away with. Nobody gives a shit if a GUI widget takes 1 second vs 100 milliseconds. We care very much about if data acquisition and processing is repeatable.
We put our efforts into where they're the highest impact, and vibe the stuff that doesn't.
As far as the technical side, I really don't know. LLMs seem to have a huge amount of technical knowledge, and can mostly use it, but don't have comment sense and make bewildering errors.
My colleagues have some very esoteric technical knowledge, and also lack common sense and make a completely different class of bewildering errors.
Between the two, I think the gaps are better covered.
Full-Spectral@reddit
Now picture yourself getting onto a plane or about to go into surgery and hearing someone who works for the company that built them saying what you just said. Would you feel comfortable getting onto that plane or getting your chest cut open?
And, believe it or not, some people actually ship products and cannot just thow a fix on a server five times a day. They have to get things right before it goes out the door.
Bakoro@reddit
Lol, did you just out yourself as /u/Dean_Roddey's other account, /u/Full-Spectral?
Full-Spectral@reddit
I didn't out myself. They are both me and I've never made any attempt to hide that, lots of people are well aware of it. One is my personal account and one is for use otherwise.
I would have thought that the actual points made were what's important.
Electrical_Stay_2676@reddit
I love it during stand up when you say what you’ve been working on and they switch off because they have no idea what you’re talking about.
Blueson@reddit
I have never been in an org where managers are expected to join your daily/stand up. People like product owners, scrum masters and such, sure. But managers?
Not unless they are called in for other types of decisions, but then you're not doing stand ups correctly anymore.
Electrical_Stay_2676@reddit
I work at a non tech company where developers are an afterthought and they don’t do agile properly. We don’t have dedicated product owners/scrum masters etc
pale_doomfan@reddit
Watch their eyes: you can almost see them reboot...
rupayanc@reddit
non-technical managers persist partly because most orgs have no reliable signal for engineering quality until something breaks in production. clean architecture and test coverage are invisible to leadership until the moment they're absent. that's the core psychology problem: the incentive for technical rigor doesn't activate until the cost of skipping it shows up, usually quarters later and attributed to something else entirely. the managers who survive are the ones good at plausible deniability.
Kissaki0@reddit
Would be nice if the pageload had all content. In my Firefox, I see two paragraphs and the article ends with “Where are these managers coming from?”.
CodrSeven@reddit
This is a big problem imo, how is someone who doesn't even understand what's going on supposed to manage the work?
hotgator@reddit
The issue is in a larger corp with non-technical or out of touch VP's and directors it's very easy for a technically deficient manager to pretend he knows what he's talking about.
ptoki@reddit
The assumption is that you have a manager who manages and a designer/senior developer who does the technical work and sets the technical direction.
IMHO it often is not the case and you end up with so-so technical crowd who will do the bare minimum or whatever fits them and no actual product/result so you need a guy who tells people what to do so the result is not as shitty.
CodrSeven@reddit
That's the idea.
What typically happens is you get a moron with abusive personality disorders that uses the team as their personal playground and most of the time is spent getting them up to speed or working around them.
alchebyte@reddit
with bold confidence (backed by their favorite LLM)
Kynaras@reddit
I think the author is allowing his vehement disdain for non-technical managers to taint his logic. The author makes some valid points, only to immediately resort to reductionism and blanket statements about how businesses are run.
More importantly, I am struggling to reconcile the author's title and article focus when the main cause behind non-technical managers falling away is that he claims entire IT divisions will cease to exist in the future because advanced ML models are being created that will build, maintain and update features on the fly for in house tech needs. Websites, HR systems, remuneration etc will supposedly all be handled by models with minimal human headcount needed.
So even though he presents this as a hit piece against non-technical managers, his final conclusion means huge swathes of roles - both technical and non-technical - are soon to be obsolete. The only software engineers he sees surviving are top tier ML software specialists. Most other devs are done.
I don't think the author realises how much his hate for non-technical managers are undermining his reasoning here. He revels in the demise of non-technical managers while blithely proclaiming that most of his technical colleges in the industry will be jobless alongside the managers he so hates.
derjanni@reddit (OP)
Websites and HR systems will cease to exist
limits660@reddit
I have a Bachelor of computer science and an MBA.
I fall right into this sweet spot of very technical and supposedly have the business skills to back it up.
Been unemployed for over a year now.
20 years coding experience too.
Splashy01@reddit
Damn man. What’s a schmuck like me with an associate’s degree to do?
adambair@reddit
Have paid off school loans? associates fist bump
Splashy01@reddit
🤜🏼🤛🏼
XYcritic@reddit
I have a PhD in machine learning and have been doing this stuff for 15 years or so. Past 5 as project lead, owning the entire project, including the business side.
I'm unemployed for a year because I can't find something with reasonable pay or hours. I've found that non-technical managers using n8n and other agentic trash for projects think they unironically have more experience than me.
0 tech background, using "AI" since 2 years but confidence of a fucking Tiger. I swear to god, all they know is agentic software, LLMs and Cloud integration. They're complete shit at analyzing a customer's demands and coming up with a robust solution.
You would think the market would appreciate someone with experience on both sides. More evidence that the entire thing is not sustainable.
killver@reddit
Maybe thats your issue. There is no way you wouldnt find a good job with that experience if you would lean in at least a little bit into new ways of working with AI.
XYcritic@reddit
Partly, yes, because I hate what my field has become. But again: for reasonable hours and pay, there's just no demand in the B2B automation business if every Manager or Exec thinks they can vibe code a prototype on their own or hire someone with only business knowledge for a lower salary. LLMs are great at letting people think they know stuff when they really don't.
killver@reddit
You are too short minded. If you learn how to use these tools coupled with your vast experience you can outperform both sides of the story and you will find a lot of good jobs.
XYcritic@reddit
Wow thanks for this valuable advice, never considered this. I'm sure I'll get more interviews now that my mind is open.
killver@reddit
Yeah not with that attitude
jasterpj17@reddit
What roles have you been applying to?
FalseWait7@reddit
I think people are missing the big picture: being a manager requires skills that software engineers might not have. Most devs-turned-managers I know lack the least amount of empathy and all they can do is echo whatever business wants.
buscuitsANDgravy@reddit
Not specifically for managers, but we do need highly experienced functional SMEs/Domain experts to ensure AI agents are given accurate specs to develop new software
ganapathiinvest@reddit
non technical manager should not even be a thing .. civil engineer who cannot build a house .. a software fellow cannot code but do real estate business should not be called as engineer
Dragoons101@reddit
Dawn. Is. Breaking.
CodeToManagement@reddit
I wish people would get over this idea that engineering managers have to be technical
I’m an EM, yes I’m technical I was a dev for 13 years.
But I can be honest and say in my day to day most of the skills I draw on are not tech skills they are more people and process focused.
Infact I tell any teams that if I’m needed to be the technical expert in the team we have seriously fucked something up - that’s what staff engineers and tech leads are for, people who are hands on with code regularly should be advising managers on the technical direction and managers should focus on fixing process and making sure the people are supported properly.
Of the biggest impacts I’ve had as a manager most are not related to my skills as a programmer at all
RollinPandas@reddit
Did you read the article?
Most of it was focused on the traps that non technical managers fall into with respect to their management role.
For example: Not baking in enough time for addressing tech debt or enabling the team to work on technical architecture.
The article was not about expecting managers to perform technical IC functions in their roles.
CodeToManagement@reddit
Yea and the solution to that isn’t just say the only people who can now be EMs are programmers or people from a technical background.
EM and programmer skill sets are completely different
michal_s87@reddit
Idk man...
You're saying that there are staff engineers and tech leads who should be advising EMs on technical direction. And you're saying that those EMs don't need to be technical. If you have it organized like this, then what are the chances that the EM will not see any value in non-functional requirements? After all, some "refactoring" is only delaying the delivery of the next feature, and their promotion and bonuses are tied to delivering the next big thing. And then they jump ships anyway. The article is called "fake it till break it".
Of course, because it's not about programming. It's about understanding software engineering.
Non-technical EMs are basically project/people managers, except more expensive.
Fajan_@reddit
Well, ngl, I feel this is a bit exaggerated.
While it's true that the "fake it until you make it" kind of PM/manager would have a tough time now, the fact remains that good non-technical managers never pretended to do their job.
AI, in a way, makes it easier to differentiate between managers. Those that had been depending on technical lingo get exposed, but the ones who really know what systems are about remain relevant.
Kind of same thing happens even when one builds apps; using tools like Cursor may speed up the process of coding, but determining what to create and why remains difficult.
In essence, this sounds more like the end of low-level managers than the end of managers overall.
hl_lost@reddit
lol the title reads like a prophecy from someone who just discovered chatgpt and thinks middle management is shaking in their boots
tbh the real issue isn't technical vs non-technical, it's whether the manager actually understands what their team does enough to shield them from bad decisions. i've had non-technical managers who were incredible at that and technical managers who were absolute nightmares because they wanted to micromanage every PR
StolenRocket@reddit
Not sure about that one. If anything, LLMs have given the ability for non-technical managers to pretend they have a great technical capacity so if anything, the issue of non-technical managers disrupting worse has gotten worse, not better. Before you'd be able to clock someone has no idea what they're talking about, now it takes a bit of time to figure out someone is just parroting whatever chatGPT tells them
japanfrog@reddit
And then you have Microsoft, who historically had being technical practically a requirement for management positions. Now all you need is an mba and connections.
TheCarnalStatist@reddit
As long as engineers are shit at social skills and owners' cousins need jobs there will be non-technical management in IT.
3xBork@reddit
At respecting any occupation other than their own, too.
Plank_With_A_Nail_In@reddit
Does no one get sick of repeatedly telling these people how the IT systems work only for them to forget instantly?
1) They don't know how any business works
2) They don't know how the business they work for works (despite being recently told, despite leading a $million change to it, in on ear out the other)
3) They don't know how good IT infrastructure works in theory
4) They don't know how the company they work for's T infrastructure works (despite being recently told, despite leading a $million change to it, in on ear out the other)
5) They don't know the tools their teams use
6) They don't know the languages their teams use.
They legit go into meetings with the rest of the business displaying this ignorance loudly and then telling there are none of the expensive resources the business paid for available for critical work (which they have no clue its critical).
I got out of salaried IT because of sitting with these dumbasses filling in their documents for them about things we sometimes discussed that very morning in a meeting. Supposed to make it so our time isn't wasted.
wannaliveonmars@reddit
I don't think that's true.
I work in healthcare software. Hospitals can't switch vendors easily, and it's a subscription model, so if our productivity deteriorates, the corporation still makes money. Clients are basically stuck with us.
Managers know each other, and they appoint each other. Since the non-technicals are in charge of hiring and firing, I don't think they're in danger. They are not going to fire themselves.
And the corporation itself is too big, and has too much of a regulatory and systems-integration "moat" to be driven out-of-business by a competitor, even if they are better at actually writing software than us.
jqVgawJG@reddit
I think this post title is out of touch with reality
hkric41six@reddit
I would rather do a different career entirely than ever go into management.
Eastern-Cold7087@reddit
After my 9 hours straight of meetings today…I miss my IDE.
7h4tguy@reddit
Problem is 9/10 they pull in the IC SMEs too to back them up. So 5h of meetings and still expected to be productive on top.
hkric41six@reddit
I'm so sorry bro. I'd literally become a truck driver and get 1/10 the salary if I was every put in that position. Shit like this is why I am so intensely focused on finance, investing, and living below my means. The moment I get too many meetings on my calendar, I start saying "fuck you".
nemec@reddit
Sounds like a lot of work when you could just quit and work somewhere else lol
hkric41six@reddit
Thats not a lot of work at all.
RzrKitty@reddit
Oh yes! I really miss the creativity and the ability to just focus. All day long meetings is so draining.
elSpanielo@reddit
As a 15 year developer who has now been a manager for 7 years, I concur, don’t do it!
Few-Needleworker4391@reddit
Bit of a headline
arkumar@reddit
On the contrary the ongoing AI coding agent hype is not only going to accelerate but cause a cambrian explosion of the non-technical managers. Managing couple of senior engineers and few AI agents
NotARealDeveloper@reddit
Lol it's the complete opposite. We fired all our engineers except for the architects. Now the product managers orchestrate 10-15 ai agents under the supervision of architects. If you know the problem domain, the customers requirements and you can now iterate yourself on implementations thanks to ai, you no longer need the middle man. Architects are still required to keep the ai in line in case they do dumb shit.
DaGr8Gatzby@reddit
NotARealAccount
bingeboy@reddit
Oh sweetness ❤️🔥😎
Sweet_Television2685@reddit
the end of the dawn of the new twilight
ViscountVampa@reddit
The 85%+ middle manager readership of r/programming LARPing as engineers: WE DISAGREE WITH THAT. /s
iNoles@reddit
I had an office admin/project manager handled all client comms but the requirements were always unclear, always changing, and they weren’t in the office enough to manage tasks.
metaTaco@reddit
I'll be sure to inform my manager of this development.
bi-bingbongbongbing@reddit
There's going to be non-technical managers as long as they're cheaper and businesses are short sighted.
limits660@reddit
Exactly!!!
And of course nepotism
auximines_minotaur@reddit
I don’t think it makes a ton of sense to expect managers to be technical. The eng work they do is largely performative anyway. Surely there’s something more useful they could be doing?
TurboGranny@reddit
lol, you mean there might actually be a demand for those of that dove on the management grenade to spare the team?
Dreadsin@reddit
Nah this won’t happen. People don’t hire for merit, they hire for likability
marabutt@reddit
I have had non technical managers that were a real asset to the team. Getting difficult types to work together. Helping us plead our case to other management and planning projects.