Skip to main content

Are managers valuable?

Are managers valuable? Or useless? Or harmful?!


I can admit that during my 17 years career in sw development, I have developed sometimes a bit cynical view on managers. And therefore a sound interest on ideas around not having any, like teal and holocracy (although I am not a big fan of those either 😀).


Cynicism comes from managers who think it is their job to make decisions for other people. Decisions like what information to share and for whom, who to hire where, and how to do things. So decisions which mostly affect other peoples work. And these type of managers are not just useless, I think they are extremely harmful. I'd rather take a manager that does nothing than this type of a manager.


But I've also had privilege to work with managers who advice, share, participate, challenge and empower. Managers who get the best out of teams and individuals. Managers that give me hope.


My question to all managers is: what type do you want to be?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Testing drunk

(My first blog writing ever.) I've been thinking a long time that it's funny how many bugs I find by accident. Try to do something, make a mistake and boom - a bug is found.  Making the mistakes intentionally doesn't quite work - that's why they are called accidents I guess.. So I've thought of ways to make myself more prone to accidents, coming up with an apparent one; testing drunk. TUI (testing under the influence). So this I gotta try. More to come on that later.
3 comments
Read more

Periodical retrospectives are lame

  "You got nothing, not a single thing?! Well lets just end this here then." I remember well when I said this, being very frustrated. About ten years ago I had been working as a Scrum master for a team some months, and putting quite a lot of effort into planning our scrum teams sprint retrospectives. Lot of work also because I felt we were not getting too much out from them; not very good discussions, very few actions, and even the few actions we did come up with did not stick.  And then it happened: a retro where none of the participants came up with anything to say about the sprint. Regardless of the retro topic boxes, reading of books on retrospectives, getting inspiration from tools like retromat.org, having them in different places, using all kinds of different formats and rainbow coloured post-it notes. Not a single thing. Blank.  So then I said the words, out of frustration, mainly to myself. Why couldn't I get this thing everyone is so hyped about to work? Af...
Post a Comment
Read more

The miseducation of Exploratory Testing

I've been noticing a phenomenon lately, that is the over/misuse of the term Exploratory testing. As many testers seems to have kind of settled for the Exploratory testing paradigm and have moved to new frontiers like checking vs testing , it seems many other parties are really getting into it, and of course understanding it in different ways. Couple of examples of this phenomena: 1. In my final days as a consultant one of our sales people, had visited a customer who had no experiences about testing, but specifically requested the sales man to give a offer on Exploratory testing 2. I just looked at the program of Agile testing days 2013 , and really many of the testing related talks were labeled about Exploratory testing, although to me many seemed to talk/practice testing in generally It's nice that the Exploratory testing is gaining momentum, but I am also a bit worried about it. The examples listed above could be supported by many others, which kind of give me the impr...
2 comments
Read more