Great engineering managers ARE worth their weight in gold; however, what burns me is that every manager is ASSUMED to be worth their weight in gold solely for holding the position. When they fail, they can either blame it on their team or on the complexity of predicting software.

If you have a GREAT manager, not only will they not blame the team, but they will also not be able to hide behind the fog of war because they should have transparency through management techniques that SCRUM and Agile provide.

Developers have valuable skills of their craft, but then so do great sales people, great marketing people, great CFOs, etc. The craft skill, to me, is the core of the problem you raise. In other words, if the sales manager or the financial manager cannot do the craft of sales or finance better than the team, or teach them how to do it better, then they are lesser managers. I always advise aspiring managers to remember their craft skills.

I would be careful about polarizing dev skills vs. soft skills/talkers. This glosses over the craft skills necessary to do the jobs outside of engineering or the skills necessary to be a CFO or a CEO. Put another way, if a CEO is a blowhard who can’t do shit, then your logic is valid. But in today’s world, becoming a CEO is a tall order and requires a shitload of Craft Skills, each of which is as important as writing code. [As a former programmer, I humbly claim the right to make this claim! :-)]

Salaries are set in a market, and a little Economics might help here:

Supply – overabundance of lower skilled QA people drives these salaries down. Scarcity of great engineering managers drives these salaries up. Scarcity of great CEOs drives salaries up. Scarcity of project managers who are also strong technically drives salaries up. Bear Stearns’ demise in NYC ruins things for everyone in investment banking.

Demand – great developers consistently command high salaries and often through downturns because the demand remains at some level. Marketing people are the first to be fired in a downturn.

I would add Risk to this. Sales people are wiling to put half their paycheck on the line which is why the head of sales in some companies makes more than the CEO. A sales person at Oracle may have a lower base than many developers, but the commission could end up more than doubling their base.

Risk applies to managers. Rather than focus on engineers vs. their manager, CIOs face tremendous risk, and as a result, their turnover rate is high. They can make a ton a money, but everyone bitches about IT.

I’ll finish with perhaps something controversial to developers. Great engineering managers are extremely valuable because if they are great, they can predictably manage complex development. Software development in spite of agile and wonderful innovations is still hard to predict. Businesses rely on predictability, and an engineering manager who has the Craft Skills of planning and managing is rare and valuable. [See Supply and Demand].

OK, now go at me!! Thanks Max for the post.

Jeffrey
http://www.radiowalker.com

1. No situation is the same. Might be similar, but never the same.
2. In the new ‘global’ world, you have to have the soft skills. If you don’t, what is stopping the soft skilled talkers from outsourcing your job?
3. A good manager puts himself in front of the team and even when behind closed doors, sticks up for his team. This takes a lot and shouldn’t be undervalued.
4. I disagree with your disagreement. A manager’s reputation is based purely on the success his team has. If the team isn’t successful, the manager is to blame because the necessary changes were not made in time or he/she did not manage expectation well. His next job will entail a ‘why did your project fail’ question at the interview, the programmer will say that his code was great, the project was just mismanaged. Even if the manager says the programmers sucked, he has to answer the question of ‘why didn’t you adjust your team’.
5. See number 1.

I am very torn over my own post.

You will always find diamond in the rough development managers that are worth their weight in gold, but in my experience all managers were over paid and never lived up to the expectations of the development team (maybe the client side, but never the dev team).

I guess in the end, I am hopeful that time and development evolution will fix this issue, but I am not holding my breath in this lifetime…

I’m a codemonkey in the trenches, so I want to embrace this concept, but maybe I’ve been warped by too much business concept exposure. I hope you can convince me I’m wrong.

My point exactly. Lean organizations normally don’t fall in this category because they are normally ultra-aware that they are carrying dead weight…