Comment by Tenhundfeld
11 years ago
What? I imagine there are many, many auto manufacturing VP's who think, "I don't know anything about engines and drivetrains and all that technical stuff [– and I don't need to]."
Why should the VP of Human Resources need to know how a drivetrain works? Or the CTO? Or the CFO?
They are experts in their area focus. It's ridiculous to expect every manager to understand everything about their business. Would you expect the CTO of Starbucks to be able to tell you how all of their drinks are made?
I wouldn't. And I wouldn't care if they could.
In general, a good executive doesn't need to know the minutiae. They need to know how to motivate people, how to keep projects on track, how to recognize talent, how to delegate, how to budget, how to distill information for other executives, etc.
Sure, knowing the minutiae usually helps. It's easier to sniff out all the BS people feed you, etc. But it's far from the most important knowledge and skills a great leader needs.
I've only skimmed the article so far, but the part that stuck out to me was this (technical manager talking to the VP): “My people are split on platform,” he continues. “Some want to use Drupal 7 and make it work with Magento—which is still PHP.” He frowns. “The other option is just doing the back end in Node.js with Backbone in front.”
Now, that's an example of a terrible trait for an executive. TMitTB clearly has very little ability to communicate with people outside of his area of expertise. The ability to convey complex ideas simply is crucial. Why would a non-technical executive care about the framework you're using? That's asinine. Worrying about the implementation is TMitTB's job. When meeting with the VP, TMitTB should talk about the business impact of options. This option is cheapest but doesn't give us these features that the marketing department says they must have. This option is best, but it's much more expensive to hire developers with those skills right now.
"When meeting with the VP, TMitTB should talk about the business impact of options."
I don't think he even knows what the business impacts are. TMitTB is just a tech guy who works for the new CTO. Presumably, the CTO (being an executive in charge of technology) can speak both the language of tech and the language of business and could make a business case to the VP, in terms he understands, as to why the company needs the new software. The CTO should not have sent her tech guy to talk to the VP.
TMitTB (in his "mid-30s") seems in over his head. And he's not a "tech guy", but a "Scrum Master". And he spends so much time (and money) at conferences that he is specifically brought to task for wastefulness ("he has apparently spent all of his time at conferences and no time actually working"). When he eventually delivers, months late, it's "a plain and homely thing" and he's still cagey about a go-live.
Yet at the end of all this, "TMitTB will get his bonus."
WHAT!?
What's the message here? Big companies are hard and inefficient places? Programmers and techies are confusing and dress funny?
Other than being technically illiterate, the VP seems to be the hero of this story. Not recognized as such, of course ("Money? Hours? Due date? Value? Bah!").
The CTO ("who has several projects on roughly the same footing [e.g., horribly mismanged] scattered across the organization") and TMitTB should have been fired long before the 30,000 words came to a close.
This is the only valid answer, here. Why is the guy not talking in terms of technical debt, business impact, KPIs etc.?
If he really knows his shit, he should be expected to break his technical insight down into layman-friendly terms.
Hell, we're expecting just that from our doctors all the time.