I’ve been following Joe Duffy’s blog for some time and this year he started a series on Software Leadership. In his first post he covered a number of different types of mangers but he didn’t cover the one that I feel can be the most dangerous: the ex-programmer turned manager.
While I think it’s great that Joe wants to maintain his coding skills and act as a mentor and leader towards his team, this is an ideal that would struggle to exist for long in the Enterprise Arena, IMHO. In the small companies where I’ve worked the team sizes have not demanded a full time project manager and so they have to ability to remain first-and-foremost a quality developer. In the corporate world the volume of paperwork and meetings takes away time they might have to contribute and so their skills eventually atrophy. In our fast-paced industry technologies and techniques move on rapidly and so what might once have been considered cutting-edge skills may now just be a relic of the past, especially when a heavy reliance on tooling is needed to remain productive.
There are some parallels here with the amateur football leagues, e.g. Sunday football [1], which I played in for many years. Someone (usually a long standing player) takes the role of manager because someone needs to do it, but ultimately what they really want to do is play football. As the team gets more successful and rises up the divisions the management burden takes hold and eventually they are spending more time managing and less time playing. At some point the quality of the players in the team changes such that the part-time player/manager cannot justify picking himself any longer because as a player he has become a liability - his skills now lie in managing them instead.
In software teams every full-time developer is “match fit” [2], but the danger creeps in when the team is under the cosh and the manager decides they can “muck in” and help take on some of the load. Depending on how long it’s been since they last developed Production Code this could be beneficial or a hindrance. If they end up producing sub-standard code then you’ve just bought yourself a whole load of Technical Debt. Unless time-to-market is of the utmost priority it’s going to be a false economy as the team will eventually find itself trying to maintain poor quality code.
No matter how honourable this sentiment might be, the best thing they can do is to be the professional manager they need to be and let the professional developers get on and do their job.
[1] Often affectionately known as pub football because it’s commonly made up of teams of blokes whose only connection is that they drink in the same boozer.
[2] Deliberate Practice is a common technique used to maintain a “level of fitness”.
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