Your Incompetent Boss Is Making You Unhappy 204
HnT writes A new working paper shows strong support for what many have always suspected: your boss's technical competence is the single strongest predictor of workers' well-being, way ahead of other factors such as education, earnings, job tenure and public vs. private sector. On top of other studies which have already demonstrated that happy workers are more productive workers (e.g. this 2012 paper.), it does make you wonder how long organizations can afford to continue promoting incompetent bosses in today's very dynamic and competitive business world.
Duh (Score:5, Funny)
NO SHIT. We needed a paper to tell us what we already knew? Damn, why didn't I write that paper... Here goes.
"INCOMPETENT BOSSES ARE THE LEADING CAUSE OF CAPSLOCK RAGE ON THE INTERNET"
Re:Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
We need a paper to tell our bosses what we already knew.
Re:Duh (Score:5, Funny)
We've received your concerns, and our reply will be arriving on a pink slip shortly.
Re:Duh (Score:5, Funny)
Joke's on you, I'm self-employed! That means I'm my own stupid boss!
Oh wait.
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If it weren't for needing to earn money, I'd NOT be working at all, I have plenty I'd rather be doing if independently wealthy.
The only reason to work is money. Paying me enough to suffer it from whatever the source (boss, co-workers, the work itself) is the only thing I'm really interested in.
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... I can withstand... ... to suffer it...
I don't either of these phrases equate to 'being happy', which is what TFA was actually referring to.
But yeah, most of us keep showing up anyway because we need the money.
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Soylent blue is managers! MAAAANAGGGERSS!! (Score:3)
We can't very well grind them up into hamburger and feed them to the poor.
There aren't enough circuses left anymore where we can rely on escaped lions to keep the manager population in check.
Re:Soylent blue is managers! MAAAANAGGGERSS!! (Score:4, Funny)
Something about a B Ark [geoffwilkins.net] ...
Re:Soylent blue is managers! MAAAANAGGGERSS!! (Score:5, Insightful)
And what are we supposed to do with these incompetents if we can't promote them out to management?
Where do you think executives come from.
You'd be surprised how much damage an incompetent executive can do. It may not be immediate, but it poisons an organization systemically. A bad boss can be fired. Firing a bad exec may not remove the toxins fast enough for the organization to recover.
The point (Score:2, Informative)
You seem to have missed the point. I don't think it's a mystery that the competence of your boss contributes to your workplace happiness. The important thing relevant to this study, however, is that the competence of your boss is the single strongest predictor of workers' well-being, way ahead of other factors such as education, earnings, job tenure and public vs. private sector.
That's not a "duh", and it's a valuable piece of data that companies can use to try to retain valuable employees, a direction in
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You seem to have missed the point. I don't think it's a mystery that the competence of your boss contributes to your workplace happiness. The important thing relevant to this study, however, is that the competence of your boss is the single strongest predictor of workers' well-being, way ahead of other factors such as education, earnings, job tenure and public vs. private sector.
That's not a "duh", and it's a valuable piece of data that companies can use to try to retain valuable employees, a direction in which they can invest resources to avoid costly turnover and the constant expense of training new employees and/or avoid loss of productivity due to miserable employees.
So how do companies recognize these valuable bosses? The study itself may provide the answer. If competency predicts happiness, then perhaps worker happiness is a predictor of competence? The implication is that perhaps employees should be given a bigger say in who gets promotions. I suppose we run the risk of bosses taking a bread-and-circuses approach to employee management, but it seems fairly obvious that if the people you're already managing are miserable, you shouldn't be promoted so that you manage e
Re:Duh (Score:4, Funny)
If you are dead, you don't know you are dead but all the people you know are effected from your death.
The same is true with Stupidity.
Your Incompetent boss doesn't know that he is incompetent, yet we all suffer from this.
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Wow, +1 for the elegant analogy. You could extend that, and note that the incompetent boss is dead from the neck up.
Re:Duh (Score:5, Informative)
Since I was able to get off a wise ass crack joke for a first post, let me follow it up with something actually insightful for you other readers out there.
What makes a "good" or "bad" boss anyways? Well, this article is one that I've always lived by, and it explains things quite well for both us techies and for those who are not of the tech mindset and skill set.
http://www.computerworld.com/a... [computerworld.com]
Read this article several years ago (Score:2)
and it feels even more true today. Thanks for the repost, I had forgotten about it.
Re:Duh (Score:5, Informative)
Hadn't seen, read big chunks thru carefully and scanned the rest. Looks like it has potential to stand alongside the old bell labs star performers [hbr.org] study/doc. Thank you 1e6.
No shit, (Score:2)
Sherlock.
This needed studying?
Re:No shit, (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, it did. Because quite regularly, those things that "everybody knows" turn out to be not actually true.
We as humans are amazing at spotting some things and judging them correctly immediately. It's a survival trait, which is why it's so highly developed.
But it goes wrong in many cases, especially in those where false positives are harmless but false negatives deadly.
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Counter-intuitively, the phrase comes from an analysis of lunch counters i the 50's.
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Yes, it did. Because quite regularly, those things that "everybody knows" turn out to be not actually true.
This is evident since people seem to "just know" things that are easily disprovable, not just hard to prove subject matter that requires a research paper.
A google of phrases like "most people think" can make for some fun afternoon reading.
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quite regularly, those things that "everybody knows" turn out to be not actually true.
Yes, and this is why we bother to study things. If you could go back in time a few hundred years, you'd find that already "everybody knows" how the world works, more or less, and they'd be wrong about a lot of it.
In fact, I don't even think this is necessarily what I'd expect. Yes, of course your boss's competence would have some relationship with your job satisfaction, but this goes much farther: "your boss's technical competence is the single strongest predictor of workers' well-being"
That's quite a s
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Believe me, I understand the problem, but I would suggest that the problem might not be quite where you think it is.
For example, someone who is a competent manager might have developed a process for sorting out issues that are beyond their technical expertise. They might choose someone from among the techies to serve as an adviser, or choose a technical lead who is capable of making those decisions, and delegating those decisions outright. They could round up the senior techs and have them vote on it.
Or
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It's really simple:
All managers have to make decisions based on limited information. They have neither the time nor luxury of weighing all data. It's their business to make a decision when the decision needs to be made, not when all data analysis has been finished.
Good manager know what to look for and what to discard. That may include the expertise of their people, but every case is different and just because one manager they admire once went against the expertise of the experts he employs and was right do
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Correction: false positives are mostly harmless.
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You underestimate management's inability to look critically at itself as the cause of employee unhappiness. The workers damn well know it. This report is simply to clue in management.
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Not just the knowing, but how important it is for productivity.
Send this to your HR person.
Re:No shit, (Score:4, Interesting)
Studying why people are unhappy in their jobs is worthwhile so that people can learn how to find jobs that they are happier in as happier workers tend to be more productive.
I'm not sure I agree with the conclusion though. Personally I find that my best managers were the ones that had little or no technical ability in the realm of what their staff did. They also happened to be the ones that actually understood the role of a manager and managed the team/projects on the whole rather than trying to get into the details. All the "knowledgeable" managers I've had fall into two equally bad (to me) categories. The first really doesn't know as much as they think and make life more difficult by injecting bad or wrong information into the process which (at best) drags things out or (at worst) makes the whole team look like a bunch of idiots that can't get their stories straight. The other group is those that actually do know their stuff, but they fall back to just doing it themselves rather than managing their team to get things done.
The real key is that the staff has to trust the manager to stay out of the low level details and the manager has to trust his staff to actually be competent at their jobs (and if not, do something proactive about it). Without the trust and everyone sticking to their actual role it all falls apart and people are miserable.
It does make you wonder ... (Score:2)
how long organizations can afford to continue promoting incompetent bosses ....
Depends on how many idiot son-in-laws you have working there.
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Peter Principle (Score:5, Interesting)
The solution (assuming you're already in a state with incompetent managers) is to allow incompetent managers to be demoted back into a position they're competent in. Unfortunately, society has a huge bias against workplace demotion.
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This one hundred times.
The company who can solve the issue of demotion without loss of face is going to go far.
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This one hundred times.
The company who can solve the issue of demotion without loss of face is going to go far.
How about demoting the incompetent boss and the fuckwit who promoted them that one step too far together? Root cause analysis, after all, is crucial when resolving a process failure...
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How about demoting the incompetent boss and the fuckwit who promoted them that one step too far together?
You can only discourage risk-taking to a certain extend before your machine comes to a stop because nobody dares to move anymore.
Promoting people to management positions who have no management experience is always a risky move. Sometimes they turn out to be brilliant, sometimes not. But it's almost impossible to find out beforehand, so you just have to take the risk. The problem is that due to pay scales and perception, it's largely a one-way street and that's a huge problem.
How about rotating the boss hat? (Score:5, Interesting)
Have a culture of rotating people in and out of management to "lower" positions. Like department heads at universities, the job lasts a year or two then you're back as a normal faculty.
I rotated in and out of a money management job, now I'm back doing technical stuff. As a result I have a very good understanding of that end of the business as well as the techical end.
--PM
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I can't figure out if that's stunningly brilliant (gets people to learn a shitload more, and in wider scope), or a cowardly copout to avoid the stigma of demotion ("we demote everybody"). Maybe it's both.
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There's the up or out [wikipedia.org] philosophy used by the military, financial industry, law firms, and academia. You either excel and move on to better things or you're fired. Needs a lot of people striving for the top. But it solves the peter principle. People are not allowed to simply remain incompetent in a position for too long.
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My company seems to have gotten to the point of doing this reasonably well -- in the last 18 months or so, I saw three individual contributors (IC) get promoted to manager, and then within 3-6 months decide the job wasn't for them. In all cases, the general perception from around them was admiration they were introspective enough to realize this, and happiness they'd decide to go back to IC instead of leaving (I've also seen at least one case of someone promoted to management, who didn't realize he wasn't
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It helps to work in an environment where there are no formalized payscales that are affected by the mgmt/IC choice
This is probably the biggest contributor. Largely, for completely irrational reasons, management is he higher-paying job and that's why people want to be there, even if it's not for them.
It's also the reason you end up not just with the incompetent, but also with the even worse: The purely ambition driven eat-my-dust assholes who'll gladly sacrifice your happiness, career, success and first born son if it helps them score the next raise or the next step up their personal career ladder.
Those guys are worse t
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Can we do the same with incompetent workers? Based solely on the lousy software from multi-billion dollar companies I have to deal with on a daily basis, there are many programmers who would do wonderfully as janitors.
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The very fact that it is considered a demotion says a lot. The further you are away from the actual product, the greater your status. Pay structure is arranged in such a way that the most incompetent district manager will always make more than the most brilliant engineer. The only way to increase the engineer's pay is to 'promote' him to be an incompetent district manager.
The problem is that we see manager not as a vocation and a skillset but as a position in a hierarchy of merit.
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I worked for a company that had a good solution for that. Project managers reported to either managers or directors. Program managers handled much larger assignments and reported to VPs, SVPs, C-level... They had tremendous juice and the fact they got assigned sent a "I want to get this done" message from the executive level down to middle management. Program managers were generally chosen from directors or VPs. So this offered a way for them to demote people who had risen up to middle management and
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The Peter Principle is a concept in management theory in which the selection of a candidate for a position is based on the candidate's performance in his or her current role rather than on abilities relevant to the intended role. Thus, employees only stop being promoted once they can no longer perform effectively, and "managers rise to the level of their incompetence."
While this is part of the story, it can get even worse under situations with a lot of pressure.
The summary says:
it does make you wonder how long organizations can afford to continue promoting incompetent bosses in today's very dynamic and competitive business world.
There are a couple misunderstandings here. First off, "very dynamic and competitive" often means a lot of small businesses simply won't succeed. So, frankly, most businesses will NOT afford it. They will fail or be bought out by a competitor.
The other problem is that in such high-pressure situations (and even in less pressured situations in the business world) promotions tend to be made on
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"The Peter Principle", yeah, my uncle bought this book when it was "new", when he was studying his MBA. A good read.
Also in the book was "Peter's Parry", with parry having the meaning "to dodge". If you know you're going to suck in the higher role, how do you back off? Sadly, there's also a huge bias against people knowing their skill set limitations and saying no. "How can you refuse a promotion?!!??".
Another solution is parallel tracks. If you don't want to promote your developer into a management tr
I Once Had A Boss Tell Us He 'Hates Computers.' (Score:5, Interesting)
He was a VP in charge of a large software development organization for a Fortune Five company subsidiary.
After a reorg, and this guy came in, he called the staff to his (large, well-appointed) office, and told us to note that he did not have a computer on his desk.
He mentioned that he was a lawyer, and disliked computers.
That was my 'résumé moment' at that company.
Needless to say, that subsidiary has long since gone the way of the dodo.
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He probably didn't care. He probably got paid well.
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Far easier solution than announcing lay-offs.
Exactly what I thought also.
How do you get good people to step up? (Score:5, Insightful)
Many people don't want to manage other people. It's a tough job, often thankless, and in the words of a co-worker who quit being a boss and went back to technical work, it's like managing a bunch of four-year-olds who can't get along.
If you want good bosses, step up to the plate and make the sacrifice and do the job. Also, be a good employee, good employees can attract good bosses.
Also, in a random digression, I don't think a good technical boss necessarily HAS to be good technically. S/he just has to be able to listen effectively to the people who ARE good technically--which is something s/he should be doing even if s/he IS good technically. A boss who doesn't listen is in my opinion worse than a boss who is ignorant, knows it, and respects the experts s/he supervises.
--PeterM
Re:How do you get good people to step up? (Score:5, Insightful)
Employees having been whining about their boss' incompetence since the beginning of time. A large percentage of them reckon they can do their bosses job, and better.
And then one day they have to do a bosses job. That's when they find out that there's way more to it than they imagined.
Re:How do you get good people to step up? (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, it depends on the outlook of the boss. I went from technical to management and back to sorta technical/sorta management. The proper attitude for a mid-level manager especially for technical staff is "what can I do to make sure they can do their job?". And that's how I approached my staff at the time - what do they need from me, what tasks do I think they could be doing to further their career, what grunt work stuff has to be done and assigned to somebody? Balance all that out, make sure your team knows you are looking out for them (and take their side when dealing with upper management) and you'll have their support and enthusiasm. I wound up getting laid off and still talk to the people that used to work for me. They say I was one of the best managers they had, partially because I was technical enough to know what they were talking about, but also I was working with them before being promoted so I was almost literally in their shoes and could see their side of issues.
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Yep. When I was in the Navy, one of my juniors bitched about his workload and lack of sleep and how he couldn't wait to be senior... so I put him on my schedule for a week. He was remarkably meek after that.
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Employees having been whining about their boss' incompetence since the beginning of time
This is true. However sometimes a boss really is incompetent.
When you have to find ways to work around your boss to actually get your work done, it's probably a good indicator that your boss doesn't know what he's doing.
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Also, in a random digression, I don't think a good technical boss necessarily HAS to be good technically. S/he just has to be able to listen effectively to the people who ARE good technically--which is something s/he should be doing even if s/he IS good technically. A boss who doesn't listen is in my opinion worse than a boss who is ignorant, knows it, and respects the experts s/he supervises.
--PeterM
A similar thought. Can a boss remain good technically? Most of my bosses used to be tech people, presumably reasonably good at their jobs. But when they got promoted to the big chair, they were kept busy with boss-stuff, and their tech-skills fell behind.
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I am pretty sure this is how we will (if ever) get a good government, too. The government has to be "us" not "them" yet almost none of us are willing to let it be "me."
Representation by lottery (Score:2)
>I am pretty sure this is how we will (if ever) get a good government, too. The government has to be "us" not "them" yet almost none of us are willing to let it be "me."
How about representation by lottery? Every eligible adult (I guess I mean everyone except those currently serving a prison sentence) is entered into a lottery. The winners go serve in state or federal legislatures as representatives.
They are beholden to NO ONE to get "elected", so don't show up corrupted. And they're far more represent
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The boss in IT does not have to be technically competent but they have to be a techie for two reasons.
1) You have to be able to understand the lingo and the significance of it. I've had project managers that didn't know what a driver is. That was insulting and we had to drag this moron through the whole process.
2) If IT is run by non-techies then it's always a clusterfuck. It also tells your IT people that you think any schlub in a suit can just step in and do it.
In further shocking news... (Score:2, Funny)
Looks Like This May Be Controversial ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I manage a group of engineers; I've spent about half of my career being an IC engineer and half managing engineers, and it's been intertwined -- in this company, I started off as an IC, then became a manager, moved to another group as an IC, then became a manager. When my boss proposed to me that I manage the group I manage today, I declined because I didn't think I was technically competent enough -- I'd never actually built the huge, scalable, systems they built, and I knew they could run laps around me.
Eventually, he persuaded me to take the position, with my team's consent. On my first day with my team I sat down with each person in the team and literally my first question to each of them was "What's my job around here?" And they told me they didn't need or want someone to review or approve their technical decisions -- when they had doubt, they talked with each other. They wanted someone to help them understand our customers a little better, and that's why they wanted me.
Generally speaking, I figure my job is to act as a retention aid (my presence around should make my engineers want to stick around more than if I wasn't around) and doing whatever the hell my team needs done that engineers don't want to do. I have technical opinions, sure, and sometimes I even disagree with my engineers. And they do whatever they think is the right thing to do. I think about 80% of the time we disagree, they're right.
I'm good at some things; I'm bad at others. I wonder if the issue is not whether or not a manager is technically competent, but whether or not a manager is competent in the area in which that manager actually spends their time, and their team expects them to spend their time.
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I wonder if the issue is not whether or not a manager is technically competent, but whether or not a manager is competent in the area in which that manager actually spends their time
I completely agree. A good manager does management functions (forecasting/budgeting, recruiting, team building, training, etc). If a manager tries to be the technical lead it rips the team apart; subordinates cannot make any decisions (or their decisions are overruled) and the other functions that a manager should be doing are ignored.
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It's worth noting that this isn't always the manager's fault. A bunch of companies look for their managers to do both the classic people management stuff and the technical leadership stuff. I interviewed at Facebook some time ago, for example; FB tries to create heterogeneous engineering teams with widely disparate levels of technical expertise. While the more experienced engineers are expected to provide some technical mentoring to the engineers, most of the responsibility seems to be expected to fall t
Bottom-Up Feedback Lacking (Score:2)
The biggest problem with most orgs in my opinion is lack of bottom-up feedback. As long as a boss kisses up to the right superiors and same-level managers, they can be dickheads to their subordinates or get away with glaring gaps.
There should be more feedback from subordinates in their evaluations. Often managers have one two bad habits that if not kept in check, will run out of control. I have bad habits also that would get worse if not kept in check by my boss and colleagues, such as silly things I can ge
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A good manager can manage just about anything.
I'm glad you bolded this part, because I completely to agree, and it's one of the most important parts of understanding management overall. Management anything requires a certain skillset, particularly focused on listening and delegation (recognizing employees' skillsets and enabling employees to use them efficiently). If you're able to do that, you're able to manage any employee in any industry once you have a basic understanding of what the company and that particular group is trying to achieve.
Rubbish (Score:5, Insightful)
It is not the technical competence of the boss that is the determining factor, it is the competence at managing technical people. Technical competence of their own can help this, though it doesn't always, But it's not mandatory. I have one boss (out of three) who can reliably turn a computer on and off without printed notes (with pictures), and he has very little idea what I do. But they're good people managers. They recognize that they know basically nothing of what I do, and leave me alone to do it. They know what they want - network up and running, computers not overly slow, various new toys their friends have, and they know how to tell whether or not they're getting it. Everything else they leave to me, and when I tell them "that's not going to work" or "it's going to cost this much, and you don't want to spend that much," they trust my judgment because they know I know more about my job than they do. I've been on the same job for over 20 years, and still look forward to going to work every morning.
Managing people is a specific skillset, and not an easy one to master. And it's an important one, that computer geeks wrongly dismiss in much the same way that MBAs wrongly dismiss technical skillsets. It's a popular mistake that managers have to (pretend to) be able to do every job in their department, because MBAs are taught that. But it just isn't true.
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The problem with geeks isn't so much they dismiss management skillsets, as they dismiss pretty much every non-geek skillset or imagine that said all such sets can be reduced and converted square-peg-into-round-hole into the geek skillset. They also strongly tend to have what I call the "worm's eye view proble
Well, yeah. (Score:2)
.
I was recently "managed" by a CIO who told me outright that he does not understand technology.
Working for him was like participating in a slow motion train wreck. People were leaving the department left and right. I knew the whole situation would not end up in a happy place. And it didn't.
The Technical conundrum.... (Score:5, Informative)
This kind of thing seems to happen a lot in big companies. People that are deemed "talented" in technical jobs are "promoted" into management jobs. Other managers see this as some sort of reward for being so good at what you do. Often the technical person has risen as far as they can in terms of salary and responsibility and the only place left to go is management.
That's the conundrum. Do you stay in your current position, effectively dead-ending yourself career wise, or do you make the leap into management for greater potential riches?
The problem, as I see it, is that very few companies offer a track to senior management by sticking to the technical path. Inevitably, someone will try and steer you towards project management or some other management job. Google is a notable exception to this.
Many technical people are just not well suited to management jobs. Too many meetings, too much posturing, too many political games...too many whatever. Putting people like this in management jobs helps nobody - especially the technical person that is Ill suited for management.
So what to do?
I think that salary ranges are part of the problem. It guarantees that eventually a person will "top out" salary wise at a given job. At that point you can either go the management route or, more likely, go to a competitor that offers more money. Your hand is kind of being forced. Instead, why not continue to give this employee raises? If they have hung around long enough to get to the top pay scale and they are good at what they do then why force them to have to make that choice?
I have been a technical manager and I can say without hesitation that one great developer is worth more than 10 average ones. If I have a great developer on my team I'm going to pay them really well. If he ends up making more than me then so be it. In the end, I will look good because this rock star will carry the team. It's a win-win.
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Inevitably, someone will try and steer you towards project management or some other management job. Google is a notable exception to this.
How does Google handle this?
Obvious (Score:2)
Apart from the obviously correct outcome;
I've found that what matters most about a job is who I work under. I can't properly work under idiots. The person above me - getting on with them, not having to put on a front with them, having them understand or have done my job themselves - is the most important aspect of my selecting a job. And, sorry, but I select jobs as much as they choose whether they want me.
If you want me to work for you, you have to have done - or could do in a pinch - my job. It's a si
Unfortunately there is no solution (Score:2)
Since the fix would have to start at the C-Level. And these duds will certainly not fire themselves.
The other side of the coin (Score:2)
They're not hired for their writing ability! (Score:2)
I've frequently had bosses that wrote cringeworthy notes, the latest being a reminder to turn the clocks back for...
"Daylight Saving's Time."
Ugh. No "saving" some people.
And this is where editors might be nice... (Score:2)
Look at the following phrase at the end of TFS: "...it does make you wonder how long organizations can afford to continue promoting incompetent bosses in today's very dynamic and competitive business world."
Any editor with a nicely-sharpened red pencil would cross that right out. The first thing that pops into my head was "As opposed to some world in the past that was neither competitive nor dynamic?" When exactly was this, 'cause I don't know when it was. Being hide-bound and slow has never exactly been
Does your boss know their limits (Score:3)
In my experience, it's OK if my boss isn't technical if:
not going to change (Score:2)
"it does make you wonder how long organizations can afford to continue promoting incompetent bosses in today's very dynamic and competitive business world."
Indefinitely? As long as all organizations are doing it, there's no competitive disadvantage to it. And as long as the job market remains one in which the overall supply of workers exceeds the demand (no change of that in sight), employees will continue to put up with unhappiness, incompetent bosses, etc (at least up to the point where the incompetent bo
The worst place to have a bad boss (Score:2)
If you think it is unpleasant to have an incompetent boss at work, spare a thought for all the soldiers in WW1 whose bosses thought massive frontal assaults were the way to win.
Side Effects (Score:2)
I am not disputing that that is the best correlated variable, but in my experience it is not the lack of technical competence per se which causes problems with bad bosses but instead the concomitant pathologists exhibited by low-skill bosses to compensate for their own incompetence.
I have a story which illustrates the point: Earlier in my career I worked for a state government. One day I get to work and the lead progra
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The MBAs keep coming (Score:2)
Fuck Technical Competence (Score:2)
Potemkin (Score:2)
"it does make you wonder how long organizations can afford to continue promoting incompetent bosses in today's very dynamic and competitive business world."
As with Potemkin villages "all the way down", many organizations today are effectively "governed" by Potemkin mayors all the way up. Their success is largely due to momentum, market lethargy, and "luck" stemming from the overall skillset of their workforce.
Your headlines are annoying and condescending (Score:2)
Your Incompetent Boss Is Making You Unhappy
No he isn't. Who started this stupid trend of headlines that think they know you?
But THAT's NOT HOW IT WORKS!!!! (Score:2)
I disagree 100% (Score:2)
With one exception, the best managers I had over a 30+ year career knew nothing about programming. What they knew about was shielding developers from unrealistic expectations, pushing back on the user community's unreasonable and inconsistent demands, ensuring that budgets were adequate for the projects, arranging support from other departments (such as shipping/receiving and purchasing), and listening to what their technical staff were telling them about proposals and in-the-pipe projects.
The one excep
Correlation (Score:2)
Maybe unhappy people are just more likely to perceive their bosses as incompetent at something or other. Because obviously the problem isn't them.
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Only 8, I work at a university in a niche engineering department.
We have +12 professors. 12 Kings who only care about their "research" and prestigeprojects.
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especially blurry.
Re:Office Space (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't have to be a tech wiz to manage an IT department. In fact my bosses boss is a business degree guy who managed malls before being thrust into IT management (he had run his own skunkworks IT group at a previous employer because their central IT was so horrible, new CEO came in, got wind of what he was doing and promoted him to CIO). What he DOES do is listen to both the business people AND his technical people. He won't force a solution that doesn't work for both sides and he won't promise anything to the business that we technically can't deliver. He's by far the best IT manager I've ever worked under. My direct supervisor is technical, and I'm a technical manager, but the guys running the show don't have to be tech guys for things to run correctly, they need to be good managers.
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My direct supervisor is technical, and I'm a technical manager, but the guys running the show don't have to be tech guys for things to run correctly, they need to be good managers.
Supervisors should be technically competent. For managers this isn't as big a deal. Your CIO sounds like he has exactly the right way to approach the problem. Hire the right people, then listen to them.
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Huh? Why months to pack up?
He said build up a cushion. As in saving money. Shocking as this might be, a lot of people live paycheck to paycheck. My last boss made $100,000, his wife more than that, in Iowa, and they still had money woes. Which strikes me as crazy, but hey, not everyone has the best financial restraint.
Seriously what could possible lock you into a single location?
Family. A lot of people get such a large benefit from their local family support group that they would be devastated if that simply went away. Ever look at how much quality daycare costs in Boulder Colorado?
Alternativel
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. Shocking as this might be, a lot of people live paycheck to paycheck
To live paycheck-to-paycheck as an adult is to fail at life, or at least to fail at being an adult. Adulthood means responsibility, which for most of us primarily means financial responsibility.
Alternatively, the spouse.
IMO, the only good reason not to move to a better city for your line of work is because your spouse has a better career, and you're following his or her job around the country instead. Of course, not wanting to move with no job lined up is totally understandable, but to not even look for work in a hot market - wel
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You don't have to move if you don't want to. And perhaps you shouldn't, if your support network is important to you.
Still, there are places in the US where more tech people are needed and advancement is 100% possible. I moved from a place that was probably not Southern Indiana but still low opportunity, and took up residence in a metro area with a lot of tech. I have not had to worry about true unemployment at any time, even during all recessions we've had and I have been regularly promoted.
One of the wo
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You want respect for sucking the government tit? Fuck you!
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Obviously not covered by the study but IMO important:
A major factor in "competence" is knowing your own limitations and being able to identify when you don't know something. So a boss that KNOWS their limitations and delegates those tasks is, IMO, a highly competent one.
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If they have good leadership skills, they'll get out of your way and provide cover. In which case you better have someone with serious technical chops to lead the group in a technical manner.
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I have heard it said that the worst people for the job of management and political heads of state(city, state, etc) are the ones who ask for it the most.