Friday, October 16, 2009

Managerial Lesson

I made the mistake of using the phrase "more technical manager" in front of other managers yesterday. No doubt this will amuse French Dip. It took less than a second for another manager to jump in with "What do you mean? We're all technology managers!" Sigh. Serves me right. I should know better. I dissembled a bit and moved on with achieving my objective in other ways.

But I suspect that manager knew what I meant. I mean someone who could literally sit down at their desk and code up a Java or C# app without having to dust off a book, possibly in multiple IDEs, and might be able to tell you about the semantic similarities and differences between those languages and others, like Ruby (et al.) and give you a best case for each of them and when they actually wrote something in each one. I mean an individual who knows how to create WSDLs and REST interfaces in more than theory and can, with little effort, create stylesheets and web pages, all tricked out with CSS, XHTML, javascript and, just because it was fun, have worked with Silverlight or AIR. Someone who has a virtual machine on their desktop, or access to one for personal use they've squirreled away on the network. Someone who can read SQL, knows how to optimize it, and has used a few of the latest bells and whistles in the more recent incarnations of database products. Someone who not only knows that Inversion of Control is a software term, but has implemented it in some capacity. Ditto for at least a handful of patterns and anti-patterns. There's a lot more to it then that. So much more, and I'm not even going to get into CI, source control, and unit testing. But that's what I meant and I suspect the question wasn't meant to get that response but to send a message, despite that I didn't mean it in any way that implied a non-technical individual was lacking. They just didn't exhibit the particular strength set I was after in order to resolve a situation. Live and learn, eh?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You hit a sore spot, Scott.

FD