As a veteran, I’m sorry to hear about your experience. I’ve a lot of respect for the people I’ve met from the Special Operations community, some incredibly talented people, but it sounds like one found himself leading a team he shouldn’t have been leading.
I agree that programmers should be managed by programmers. You need to learn to fly jets to lead a fighter squadron and you need to be an operator to lead a SEAL platoon, it’s a mistake to think programming is so different.
The article made a great point that even when you do know how to program it’s incredibly difficult to manage other programmers. My current director, who is a programmer, is only concerned with commit counts and bug counts. He doesn’t like to interact with other people, maybe have a one-on-one once a year. Unfortunately, this mentality is driving quality into the ground as senior engineers grab easy bugs, don’t bother testing their work, and just hit the metrics with many working as little as possible. The irony being we’re a hyper growth unicorn.
Creating things and leading people are tough. Doing both is even tougher. Agreed that starting your own thing is the way to go. That’s pretty tough too though.
And drinks with coworkers is definitely prevalent in the military, but I think it is also pretty common everywhere. It’s good to relax outside the work environment, but that’s obviously tough to do with threats of violence. Again, apologies, that is entirely unprofessional behavior and tarnishes the reputation of other former military members so I’m sad to hear it.
Sure, I'm not generalizing to all military people, one of the people on the team was also ex military, and I've worked with ex military in the past. This was just a bad hiring decision.
IT's sad that you have to start your own thing-- I would have switched over to people management quite awhile ago if I could. I effectively did it here because nobody respected or listened to the official boss. So I had to lead without authority... I'm totally ready for that role.
The problem is, in my experience, companies are looking for MBAs or business people to lead engineers, not engineers. Too often anyway.
No problem with drinks, we did like to drink outside of work. Just did't like him interrupting us in our work screaming at us to start drinking. (And the "don't be a pussy drink more" attitude was not compatible with the culture.)
I agree that programmers should be managed by programmers. You need to learn to fly jets to lead a fighter squadron and you need to be an operator to lead a SEAL platoon, it’s a mistake to think programming is so different.
The article made a great point that even when you do know how to program it’s incredibly difficult to manage other programmers. My current director, who is a programmer, is only concerned with commit counts and bug counts. He doesn’t like to interact with other people, maybe have a one-on-one once a year. Unfortunately, this mentality is driving quality into the ground as senior engineers grab easy bugs, don’t bother testing their work, and just hit the metrics with many working as little as possible. The irony being we’re a hyper growth unicorn.
Creating things and leading people are tough. Doing both is even tougher. Agreed that starting your own thing is the way to go. That’s pretty tough too though.
And drinks with coworkers is definitely prevalent in the military, but I think it is also pretty common everywhere. It’s good to relax outside the work environment, but that’s obviously tough to do with threats of violence. Again, apologies, that is entirely unprofessional behavior and tarnishes the reputation of other former military members so I’m sad to hear it.