Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!ficc!karl
From: karl@ficc.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Information Systems is an Engineering Discipline
Summary: The thirteenth programmer phenomenon
Message-ID: <6198@ficc.uu.net>
Date: 18 Sep 89 13:15:45 GMT
References: <6429@hubcap.clemson.edu> <10835@riks.csl.sony.co.jp> <6043@pbhyf.PacBell.COM>
Organization: Ferranti International Controls
Lines: 38

> |>       Put senior, nontechnical management in charge of the project to
> |>       help ensure that it is finished on time and within budget.

> |>    Rubbish!  Managing a large information system development project is
> |>    a professional skill requiring significant technical and engineering
> |>    background.

The question is, what is the job of management?  While I think technical
decisions should be made by people with an understanding of the technical
aspects of the project, I think management can often be too involved
with the technical issues.

When a manager in charge of twelve programmers gets too technical, they
become the thirteenth programmer in the group, rather than the manager.
At that level, it is the manager's job (IMHO) to get his or her people
to work, to get them to work mostly on what they're supposed to be working
on, and to badger them to do some of the more unpleasant-to-programmers
things like schedules and status reports.

Inability or unwillingness to delegate responsibility is a common criticism
of many new managers, usually levied at those fresh from a direct technical 
job.  Once they "correctly" start delegating stuff, they lose direct contact 
with the technical end, and in a few years, their technical knowledge is out 
of date, unless they are very, very committed to maintaining it.  Typically,
the higher they are in the organization, the more technically out of date
they are, because it has been that many more years since they were technical.

Another question, how technical should they be?  Our big project has well
over a million lines & 400K statements of disk-resident software, plus
firmware, diagnostics and a good deal of built-here hardware.  It would
take years for a committed programmer to achieve a comfortable knowledge
of the innards of half the software.  Clearly, management must deal with
it at a significantly more abstract, hence less technical, level.

(Pardon the disjointedness of this.  I must hurry.  ...more later if the
discussion continues & warrants it.)
-- 
-- uunet!ficc!karl	"Have you debugged your wolf today?"