September 30, 2008 at 8:37 am
I've been mostly fortunate with managers, most have had a reasonable understanding of what I do and the tech and issues that I deal with. My current boss has been a SQL Server DBA before, so that helps. He leaves me alone to do my job, and I can bounce occasional problems off of him to get confirmation that I'm on a reasonable track to solve it.
Last week I taught an Intro to Databases to a room of 50 non-IT people that were just starting a Crystal Reports course. There was a large amount of "trust me, it'll make a lot more sense when you finish the course" built-in. But we also wanted them to get a feeling that what we do is hard, that what we do is not CSI: click a button and nicely formatted reports start spewing forth from the system.
I did this partly by explaining how five tables in an order entry system interrelate (Customer, Order, OrderLineNumber, Parts, SalesRep), showed 'em an ER diagram of those five tables, then showed 'em a diagram of one subsection of our ERP system with 42 tables. Then I told 'em our ERP system has 1400 tables in it. I think that might have rattled their faith in IT as CSI a little bit.
Explaining and teaching is fun and a challenge, especially as the technical level of the audience goes down. Very different teaching a DB 101 to mainframe programmers than to non-IT people. There's a saying, those who teach learn twice. You have to know the material to teach it, but you learn more about it as you develop practical examples.
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[font="Arial"]Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. --Samuel Johnson[/font]
September 30, 2008 at 9:38 am
Worked with both over the years and prefer either really. One depends of you and your skill and the other wants to see how it is done and would like to double check. Some feel this is a problem but a second set of eyes and the questions are always welcome.
If the manager is too technical there can bee too much overlap, if they are too lite in Technical skills there is no way to get an issue double checked and there is a tone of education you need to do to get some things done.
Both has their plus and minus.
Miles...
Not all gray hairs are Dinosaurs!
September 30, 2008 at 9:46 am
Since I have a non-techie supervisor and am surrounded by non-techie management, I find that on a day to day basis, no one is interested in what I'm doing. This is a good and bad thing. On one hand, I don't have to justify my every move to my supervisor since she has no idea how I do the things I do. On the other hand, I have no one to bounce ideas off of, and no one to go to if I need help. The things I want to be spending my time doing are usually considered not "value added" since no one can see (let alone understand) the fruits of my efforts, so I often get pulled away for desktop support-type work since they can see the results of that. On the other hand, it's kind of nice to be considered the Goddess of Data when I can produce a report in 5 minutes that someone expected to spend months tallying manually...
September 30, 2008 at 10:11 am
There's a flip side to this whole discussion of course - we're talking about programmers not understanding how the database functions, but I have worked on both sides (dev first, encountered a database for the first time at 15, after having had 5 years to learn all the "bad" habits of file based programming......) - and I have worked with DBAs who simply don't understand the application side.
I'm biased, the database is king, understand how the data fits together, then understand how the application fits the data. But often, and more and more in todays cloud and XML world, there's a lot of things that don't go into the database that need to be catered for.
As for managers understanding...... H3ll, I'm a BI developer, most of the other techies in my company don't understand what I'm doing. "Star schema?!?"
A good manager doesn't need to know what you're doing, just that it works, as long as he doesn't THINK he knows what he's doing. That's dangerous
September 30, 2008 at 10:54 am
Mark Stacey (9/30/2008)
As for managers understanding...... H3ll, I'm a BI developer, most of the other techies in my company don't understand what I'm doing. "Star schema?!?"
What's BI?
Jack Corbett
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September 30, 2008 at 11:35 am
Business Intelligence. Trying to get more usefull information out of your data.
September 30, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Jo Pattyn (9/30/2008)
Business Intelligence. Trying to get more usefull information out of your data.
Sorry, my question was meant to be funny. I do know what BI is, although I'm not a BI guy.
Jack Corbett
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September 30, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Jack Corbett (9/30/2008)
Jo Pattyn (9/30/2008)
Business Intelligence. Trying to get more usefull information out of your data.Sorry, my question was meant to be funny. I do know what BI is, although I'm not a BI guy.
You forgot the :hehe:
😎
September 30, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Personally, I'd rather have a manager who was skilled at management and poor at technology than the other way around.
My current manager likes to joke about his "prequel" skills. He's got the technical skill to build a computer, install an OS, run applications, etc. He can debug simple processes, and build simple applications in Excel or Access, and he knows the definition of "proc", but that's about it. If he had to restore a point-in-time backup, or even run a backup, he'd be lost.
On the other hand, he knows the whole company from top to bottom. He understands timelines. He's good at handling people. He understands the difference between "nice to have" and "business critical" and the various shades in between. He can keep a meeting interesting and productive. When there are problems with scope-creep and such, he helps handle them. In other words, he can manage.
I know another guy who's quite good at software development, who was promoted to a management position, and he's in over his head on that one. His department routinely produces software that doesn't meet customer/business requirements, takes months longer to produce than it should, and I don't think they've actually ever finished a project. (And I don't mean refactoring for changing needs on that last point. I mean software going to release with unifinished features that just plain don't work.)
His personnel have out-the-bottom morale. They spend more time trying to figure out how things that go wrong are someone else's fault, than they do on making sure things don't go wrong in the first place.
Given a choice between those two, I'll take a skilled manager every time.
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September 30, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Lynn Pettis (9/30/2008)
Jack Corbett (9/30/2008)
Jo Pattyn (9/30/2008)
Business Intelligence. Trying to get more usefull information out of your data.Sorry, my question was meant to be funny. I do know what BI is, although I'm not a BI guy.
You forgot the :hehe:
😎
Yup. Sometimes I just assume. Why I don't know?:w00t:
Jack Corbett
Consultant - Straight Path Solutions
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September 30, 2008 at 12:49 pm
GSquared (9/30/2008)
Personally, I'd rather have a manager who was skilled at management and poor at technology than the other way around.My current manager likes to joke about his "prequel" skills. He's got the technical skill to build a computer, install an OS, run applications, etc. He can debug simple processes, and build simple applications in Excel or Access, and he knows the definition of "proc", but that's about it. If he had to restore a point-in-time backup, or even run a backup, he'd be lost.
On the other hand, he knows the whole company from top to bottom. He understands timelines. He's good at handling people. He understands the difference between "nice to have" and "business critical" and the various shades in between. He can keep a meeting interesting and productive. When there are problems with scope-creep and such, he helps handle them. In other words, he can manage.
I know another guy who's quite good at software development, who was promoted to a management position, and he's in over his head on that one. His department routinely produces software that doesn't meet customer/business requirements, takes months longer to produce than it should, and I don't think they've actually ever finished a project. (And I don't mean refactoring for changing needs on that last point. I mean software going to release with unifinished features that just plain don't work.)
His personnel have out-the-bottom morale. They spend more time trying to figure out how things that go wrong are someone else's fault, than they do on making sure things don't go wrong in the first place.
Given a choice between those two, I'll take a skilled manager every time.
I agree. I've had manager #2 except he was such a good developer/designer the software always got done. He could have been a good manager, but he really wanted to be a developer. Never had manager #1.
Jack Corbett
Consultant - Straight Path Solutions
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September 30, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Programming and managing require two very different skill sets. My best managers were always people with sound judgment and good skills at organizing and supporting their people, regardless of their technical background. My worst managers were people who should have been technical leads or architects because they were much happier with their hands on a keyboard. In a book called "The Psychology of Computer Programming", it was pointed out that as soon as a programmer becomes a manager the currency of their technical skills begins to decline because they are no longer coding, they are managing.
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September 30, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Their skills should be declining. If they're not, then the manager likely isn't managing.
Management is a completely different skillset and I'm with you posters. I'd rather have someone running my group with strong managerial skills than strong technical skills.
I've actually managed some groups where I couldn't have done their jobs. I used to manage a team of 10 DBAs, most Oracle or DB2 and I don't really have skills in those areas. I was forced to worry about the managing part of the job and ignore the technical part. I'd like to think it worked out well, but I guess you'd have to ask them.
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October 1, 2008 at 12:56 pm
My old manager was a SQL developer before and he thought he knew everything. Every time he gave me a project, he gave me a template of how to do the project. That meant I had to do his way or no way. One time I told him his method would cause a problem, of course he did not listen to me and sure enough it caused a deadlock in the database.
It is good to have a manager that is technical but it is also important to have manager willing to listen to his/her employees opinion. Anyone who has a big ego (it does not matter whether the person is technical or not) cannot be a manager or he/she will chase all the good employees away.
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