IT Job bubble?

[Minijay]

Originally Posted by cheapdad00

I agree completely with your first paragraph. I however have had the good fortune to work with some who would put in the extra effort to do more than just admin and were capable of leading others to the preferred outcome.

I disagree on the "manager must be able to do the technical job" comment. I have seen this blow up numerous times (granted not in SW development, but in other IT disciplines) where an uber-tech was trying to transition into a lead role, then into a management role and the skillsets fell flat as managing people is a different skillset than being able to do technical work, especially under times of stress and duress.

I didn't mean to imply that uber-techs necessarily make good leaders of people. It's just that PMs are rarely leaders of people, anyway. There's no way a technical person could possibly regard them as a leader if they fundamentally don't understand what's going on with the project.

They could gain respect by taking ownership of the hard decisions -- what needs to be done at a non-technical level in order to achieve the desired results, breaking that down into tasks that technical people can fill in the details on. But not enough of them do that.

So I don't necessarily mean a PM must be able to jump into the role of any of the team members at any time and do the same thing they do at the same level of productivity (it would be hard for any technical team member to just immediately hit the ground running in that way), I'm just saying that if a PM comes in without the technical skills to really understand whether the way things are being implemented even makes sense, it's a disaster waiting to happen.

I didn't intend to categorize the good PMs in with the bad ones, it just seems that so many PMs I've met want the role they are in because of a perception they have (falsely) of prestige and power, and the fact that it has a decent salary (though often much less than the engineers they are supposedly managing).

Perhaps the best candidate for a PM would be a business analyst who has worked his or her way up in that organization and earned the title after a proven track record of understanding requirements and turning them into documents that technical people can work from. Once that accountability has been demonstrated, then maybe they are qualified to take the steering wheel on a few things. Too often it ends up being someone who just wanted to get into IT because they heard it paid well, knows just enough about computers to be a complete danger to everyone, and BSed their way into the role of "manager".

"Behaving like a leader", nice haircuts and clothes, etc just doesn't cut it these days.

[saturnfan]

Originally Posted by cheapdad00

I agree completely with your first paragraph. I however have had the good fortune to work with some who would put in the extra effort to do more than just admin and were capable of leading others to the preferred outcome.

I disagree on the "manager must be able to do the technical job" comment. I have seen this blow up numerous times (granted not in SW development, but in other IT disciplines) where an uber-tech was trying to transition into a lead role, then into a management role and the skillsets fell flat as managing people is a different skillset than being able to do technical work, especially under times of stress and duress.

The manager must understand the tech aspects so they can be sure they are not being BS'd by the tech staff about delays and that the tech solutions will solve the task. PM's don't need to do the detail work themselves.

In my agency, the job requirements flipped from tech to managing contractors, and back to tech. I stayed in tech because programming is my thing, managing is not. For this reason, my specialty was doing fixes and enhancements on existing apps, not coding new apps.

[ReachTheBeach]

Kind of echoing previous comments - if you are a developer, DBA, SA/NA or support specialist there are plenty of openings but you still have to be good at it. If you are a PM or BA there are openings but lots of competition and you have to be very good at it, good at convincing people of that and well connected to get the best jobs. I don't know any unemployed developers who are reasonably good at it. I know a few unemployed PMs who have decent track records.