The Manager Role

There are 2 kinds of manager:

1. The technical manager.
2. The non-technical manager.

The technical manager is a techie just like you and me, with the same objectives in life: Make life easier by automating stuff. He is a techinical manager because after so many years, he now the tricks of the trade and therefore he may direct a small group of developers, teach them, share stories on how to do things, and preserve old techinical knowledge that without him, for better or for worse, would become extinct.

The non-technical manager is a different beast. He knows techno-speak, but he doesn't really know the technical details, nor he is interested in those details, he just wants to know what are consequences of those decisions, so that he may talk to other technical managers and ask for help or offer help (by offering you), or otherwise, talk to technical managers and let them know what they want. Their mission is to know what the market wants and deliver it, if they are willing to pay the price.

They think differently because their objectives are opposed. While the technical manager wants to deliver more value in exchange for less (those are the forces that motivate change in the market), the non-techincal manager is after the financial gain of the company. While the technical manager tries to create new frameworks and make them work using less resources, the non-technical manager is thinking about ways to force potential clients into promoting their products, for example by forcing them to display banners and the like.

Do we really need non.technical managers? Apparently we do. But each year I see there is less need of them, since there knowledge seems to be rather spare and simple, while the technical managers seem to be getting more complex every year. Eventually non-technical managers will be reporting to technical managers, as they do at Google.

Why do companies hire both technical and non-techinical managers? Technical managers are the ones who can deliver value. There is a need to dose that value in order for clients to pay. As the techinical difficulty increases, since each year projects are more complex, no technical leader is able to understand everuthing, so the role of the non-technical manager becomes less and less necessary: The technical manager also is ignorant when talking to potential clients and has to manage the relationship superficially and with care.

Typically non-technical managers recommend that technical people, when interviewed by the customer, do not respond direct questions with yes or no, easy or hard, kind of answers, but with "delayed-execution" answers, like "I will look into it", no matter what. If you think a little bit about, let us suppose some potential customer is asking for a feature, but you just don't know if it can be implemented, you certainly need to make sure that it can be delivered on time and on budget, so you prefer to think on the alternatives and actually try them before saying when and how. That's ok for you, but puts the customer in a difficult position, because he has already expressed his reals requirements and you give him nothing to negotiate with. You simply take that information for a few days or weeks and give back the results. He may like the answer or not, but the precious time you use to decide how much it will cost is something terrible for him, because you could come up with a price he can't pay.

Now if you look at it from the perspective of the non-technical manager, it is exactly what he wants the customer to think. He wants him to think he has a solution in his hands, but probably the product is too expensive for him, so he may need to reduce the budget on other things... That's what the non-technical manager wants him to think. Delay, delay, delay, so that you can ask for ridicously large sums of money. Justifications? Sure, why not, licenses, people hired in the project, hardware, delayed meetings, incorrect specifications, etc.

So in a way the non-technical managers are necessary, for positioning the product in the market, etc., the only problem is who reports to who.