http://kw-agiledevelopment.blogspot.com/2007/07/agile-managers-need-to-turn-their.html

Kelly Waters
http://www.allaboutagile.com

Managers don’t view people as people. They view people as chunks of “deployable person-hours”, with a few critical parameters like “skill”, “friendliness”, “willingness to slog” etc. etc.

It’s important to realize, that at the end of the day, Managers are extremely selfish creatures, but like shrewd businessmen, they will camouflage their selfish interests in a way that will appear beneficial to the self development of the people working under his/her supervision. I’ve seen a lot of managers do this very skillfully (people manipulation, if you will), and I’ve also played a number of tricks to have them contradict themselves on a different occasions, when they clearly went against what they had said previously.

In short: Don’t ever trust your manager, but instead backstab him/her as and when you have the chance to, with a smiling face and professional attitude of course, do everything it takes to project him/her as worthless: highlight his failures and incompetencies to his colleagues in subtle ways, and if possible, to the people senior to him (chances of this are difficult, but nonetheless, you should never miss and opportunity), and of course: On a daily basis, bring out one point bad about him to your own colleagues, without being obvious that you’re after him. Caution must be practiced while doing all this, otherwise things could go wrong for the subordinate himself/herself.

But if you develop a well crafted scheme of doing the above, and follow it without fail and intelligently, there’s nothing that can stop your manager from facing the inevitable. Just be careful, list out all the weaknesses, and pounce in as and when you can.

But keep in mind that while you’re doing this damage to him/her, you need to develop a stronger relationship with him/her to stay out of any suspicion. Have lunches together if possible, complement him/her often (when no one else is around), help him/her on multiple occassions -> and there’s your chance: screw up something majorly which will show up at a later time wihtout bringing up the fact that it was you…..or without making it possible for the manager to get back to you during the time of wrong execution.

There are more than a hundred ways to get a manager thrown out…..but all of them take time and persistence. If both are present, then the manager will slowly grow aware and begin to believe he’s incompetent, and a failure….and in no time so will the people around him/her……and then the inevitable will have to happen…..

So far, I tied this religiously with three managers……two have already quit (one last year and one this year)…..and one is having a very difficult time…….

Always remember: Mindgames are the best weapon of choice in this corporate hell, and if you want to survive, throw away the good in you outside office, and learn to play them. The world is not nice, you know.

Peace.

Glad to see, there are good people out there fighting the good fight.

I am intending to follow up on this article, I really do think software management is much harder than most people think, mostly because of point 10.

Things have been pretty rough for me these last couple of weeks, but I will get an update out shortly.

Obviously, I have met the task with a lot of failures, for many of the reasons you listed. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, and it hasn’t been. I have tried my best to protect the teams I’ve managed, and like to feel that I’ve made a small difference in many of their careers. Some of them have left, but I have had the joy of knowing that they stayed as long as they did because I was their fighting for them up to the minute, and I had their respect.

I’m still at it two years later, and some days it just feels like it’s pointless. I have found that there are many outside forces that set you up to fail, and they challenge there is trying to cut them off at the pass and prevent them from doing too much damage. I do have those moments, however, when it feels like I’m getting through to people outside of our development world. I’ve been able to build up trust with some of our organization’s leadership and have been given the benefit of the doubt in a few cases that have helped us dodged a few bullets. Those days make it feel like it’s worth it.

On a different note, in regards to your point 4: You don’t get to do the fun stuff, that is especially true. What has helped for me is to continue your passion outside of work. I continue to do quite a bit of development outside of the corporate world that keep that itch scratched. What I have found is that those types of personal projects, the ones that don’t have all the constraints and headaches in the business world, end up being more enjoyable anyway (even if you don’t make any money with them).

All in all, nice post and hopefully more developers in those situations will try to take on the impossible and attempt to make a difference in their own worlds.

Read this book, its really good.

Its not that a programmers job should be easy and have lots of money, a programmers job is to deliver, there are poor programmers as well, there are just a lot less of them.

What I think makes a software managers job hard, is that the normal human gut instincts are all wrong. Management are *not* in a senior job, they are in a *different* job (despite how it looks). So they need to mesh with the abilities of their co-workers nor try to direct everything.

There are plenty of things that management need to focus on, that don’t necessarily have anything to do with actual development.

See also The Development Abstraction Layer.

Its not that I don’t have respect for either the job or the people, its that I am lamenting the fact we don’t have enough good ones.

My principal goal is to deliver great solutions to peoples problems, anything that helps me do that is GOOD, conversley anything that stops me doing that is BAD.

*an easy job and lots of money* see point 3

We need more objective measures to decide the quality of managers.