How do you deal with having a boss who has no programming language skills? I checked my LinkedIn feed and I see this rather young female who was made supervisor over a group which codes. No code development skills what so ever. Does it just make your job easier because someone like that could never question the efficiency of your program. Or is it more difficult because someone like that does not understand the work and asks for unreasonable deliveries.
7 replies (most recent on top)
@OP. It doesn't happen only in software, but in all the company. Many managers are not technical, delegating the technical supervision to the team leaders, the most trusted employees under them.
I'd prefer a manager that knows his/her limitations, and trust the team leader, over any of those cases that @spl+1kSNQ8kg wrote. If the manager doesn't trust enough someone in the team, or believe in his/her "superiority", it is he-l on Earth. Time to move on to another team or company.
It's best if you can get a woke manager that understands the Hr you didn't want to know. Effect micro management when not understanding technical issues helps the company ROI and profitability. Keep up the good work. You should feel privileged to be in pre-meetings where you can discuss why the color of the font doesn't center and align correctly with the company template margins. Just remember Happy Happy, Joy, Joy.
This post makes me laugh. I had numerous bosses who had no coding experience but checked all the boxes. The company's philosophy is that if you are a good manager at A, then you will be a good manager at B. These bosses that I had no basic experience turned out to be the absolute worst leaders because they considered themselves to be in that position for a reason. Whenever I started talking to them about technical issues, you could see their eyes rolling around in their head because they no idea what the issue was. But most of them knew how to make great powerpoint slides and Excel spreadsheets. Its like having a surgeon who faints at the sight of blood, but is a good public speaker.
Try to move out of there
When the manager gets the boot you will be discarded because that person is not capable to defend you and wouldnt care and will put you under the bus.
Watch your 6.
Have had it both ways one where the inept manager actually recognized she had no skills and gave me free reign. That worked out nicely. I just produced nice presentations with talking points she could present weekly and she was happy.
Then there were the nightmare managers.
- One insisted that she have access to our code libraries and she reviewed and corrected all the spelling and grammar in them and gave us all a public dressing down for sloppy work. LOL Thankfully I had the foresight to make a backup that she had no access to as NOTHING compiled when she was finished with her corrections. She had no clue that the misspellings were the coding language syntax.
- One opened up security holes because she thought she was capable to code and manage roles. Then threw her team under the bus when she failed an audit.
- One guy never learned his level of incompetence. Like clockwork he would be enhancing our code once he was good and liquored up in the evening. And like clockwork we would start getting pages at 3 AM for process failures. We automated a nightly backup at 5 PM and a restore from backup at 2 AM to wipe out all the drunk manager enhancements.
it's terrible. doesn't matter if female or male. never work for someone who doesn't "get it," your days will be mentally painful.
I had the same issue in engineering. Young female with zero plant engineering experience promoted to LL6 to puncher her plant engineering ticket on her way to LL5. She was useless, and only cared about her next promotion and pushing Ford's DEI and woke agenda. After 12 months of adding no value she moved to a staff engineering position and was eventually promoted to LL5 (level of incompetence). Six years later and she is still a staff LL5 and has survived all the cuts. Sorry for the rant, her lack of knowledge will allow you a lot of freedom, just smile and stay on her good side tell she moves on.