Ask HN: Why do we need hands-off tech managers?

3 points by hackerm0nkey 5 years ago | 3 comments

The IT industry is full of these type of roles, in all honesty and respect to everyone who's in any of these roles, what's the point?

I find most if not all of these type of roles are few steps removed from what actually happening and have no idea on the day to day reality of how good/bad a codebase is and how fragile your infrastructure is, yet they have the final say in deciding the fate of those systems and those who work on them.

What happened to result in this type of a hierarchical system that places the decision making process in the hand of the least-informed. Genuine question, how does this do a _company_ any good?

throwaway568 5 years ago |

In a large company, it's not possible for a single person to be immersed in all of the products and projects.

Therefore, any decision on resource allocation to different projects must necessarily involve input from people who are a few steps removed from what's actually happening.

Do you think there's a way around this?

hackerm0nkey 5 years ago | |

Not really referring to these type of decisions, but things like "should we extract this into a service, instead of having it to live in the monolith?", "should we use this type of tech to X" type of decisions that in most organisation is left in the hands of the multi-layer above hands-off manager that don't see the code, don't deal with it yet unable to see the disastrous implications of not addressing things. IMHO, organisations are better off leaving tech decisions to the people who _actively_ deal with that tech or at least give a higher weight to their take on the matter

hackerm0nkey 5 years ago | | |

The anti-pattern in play here is that “the decision is in the hand of the least-informed”

I believe technical decisions should be delegated by the “aware” manager to the team to make or to the most-informed. But then if the manager in question is not the aware or if ego is at play then we start getting the type of decisions that are useless at best.