Yesterday I had a conference call among us friends, the two people at the other end were computer engineers, however one was a programmer, another did not code. When I say a programmer, he is a real one, not the one who sits in an I.T company and expects money at the end of the month.

The conversation was interesting. The one who is not a true programmer (the manager) was ambitious, there is a task to be solved, the manager forgot what needs to be solved and was blabbering around this and that. He was talking about building castles in sky when he was  unable to build a sand castle on the ground. It was fun talking to him.

I see those situation every day, when we discuss superficial things and forget how our coders deal with their hour to hour tasks and forget what difficulties they face. Most managers think whats relevant to them rather than whats practical and what could be done. I wonder how its possible for one to break from reality to that extent.

One possible reason could be if the programmers use a technique or tool x, the mangers simply have no technical knowledge about it. They do not have technical understanding of each and every coders ability. They know the coder is smarter than him / her and hence expect them to do the hard part i.e coding. While the managers take pride in spread sheeting and emailing. That sucks.

Having generic managers sucks, a company that builds business with true experts is the one that will shine. If you see the fastest growing organizations, there would be almost no MBA's in them. Even if there are their roles will be limited.