IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

Kirun sounds like the typical middle manager need to look busy type. In manufacturing and service industries, they have a place because the people who report to them are mouth breathers most of the time. The vast array of knuckle draggers working in those carries need someone who can crack the whip and keep them on the straight and narrow through metrics. Technology and research fields NEVER work this way. Middle managers are either cast of MBA retards from other failed departments or less effective techs who got promoted due to office politics or Peter Principle thinking. This is as true for Incident Response as it is for development.

As someone who works both sides of the fence (I am a sysad doing incident response supporting and training a bunch of millenial and zoomer retards, but I also do app server management as well as project work) my superiors do not have an accurate picture of my impact beyond the basic metrics, but they damn well notice shit going off the rails if I am out on vacation or take a sick day. Most of the competent tech people I work with are also like this. We don't have the downtime developers do, but we also have more autonomy because time and again it has been demonstrated that if some retarded MBA type comes in and tries to micro us it just slows us down (read up on agile frameworks for a better understanding of this) vs if they just shut the fuck up, address blockers, and let us do our job they get to look good taking credit for all the little details we take care of for them behind the green curtain. All I really require a manager for is to give me project goals and to put the hammer down on junior team members who are clearly half assing things. Anything else they might do would just slow my team down, pure and simple. This is how competent tech people operate. Not flow chart following metrics obsessed lazy as fuck Poos and certainly not the entitled mentally weak zoomers, but actually experienced and skilled tech workers. Kirun is comparing apples to oranges.

Khane said:

Many of the people here have been working in either IT or as software developers/architects for close to 20+ years. So the argument that all of us "in the trenches" are bloviating about useless middle and executive management is kind of laughable.

We aren't junior devs, we are principal devs. We know what we do at the companies we work for better than any of the fly by night executives do. My company has had 4 CIOs in the last 5 years because they swoop in, tell everyone to do something drastic and useless, like migrate from git in AzDo to github, then declare victory and leave the company before the house of cards comes tumbling down with them at the helm. One of our CIOs main objectives for our company as a whole was "No more stored procedures!". That was literally something he declared in an all hands meeting. Absolutely laughable.

There is a lot of pain on the horizon in tech and AI is going to exacerbate and turbo charge that pain.

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Speaking of that! I am migrating to github from AzDo right now because our new VP wants "automation."

TJT said:

Speaking of that! I am migrating to github from AzDo right now because our new VP wants "automation."

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Our company is emphasizing this. We just promoted a girlboss with zero technical background to CTO after the last one retired, but she is basically a clone of him in that she has no technical background and latches on to whatever trend she reads about from skymall magazine. And now every other DEI/MBA slug in the org are sucking her fartbox to try and land her old position. So we have meetings on "Automate Work Away" and "Mitigating Risk". And I am thinking to myself, my team has been making gui wrapped Power Shell scripts for the mouth breathers for over two years to prevent human error and make things even more retardedly easy for them, where the fuck have you been?

But here is the perfect example of Kiruns edge lording middle manager sperg and automation crossing over. We made a bunch of simple PS Scripts to do core tasks for the purely break fix guys because getting them to do things consistently (let alone document it in an incident) is fucking impossible. We have scripts for backing up and restoring user profiles (because our company does zero roaming profiles and no client backups on user machines), gathering key system information and attaching it to the incident ticket for them, one button scrubs (routing data, internet caches, certs, ect), and so on. We started testing it within our group and it all worked out perfectly with zero need to run elevated and no imbedded credentials. Guess what happens next. A couple of non technical middle managers get wind of it and immediately want to assume ownership because they see something they can take credit for even though neither of them are from out department or even the same team. Their battle draws the attention of the Cybersec team lead, himself a complete retard, who bitches because we did not involve him from the get go. We politely inform him that he would not understand what he is looking at anyhow and that we wanted to complete testing before putting it up for review. He makes a big deal out of the whole thing, so I toss it back into his face saying "here is the source code, here are the development tools used, here is the testing. Go ahead and do a code/security review. He basically caves instantly because he can't even grasp simple PS command line scripts and his code review was him running the whole thing through Chat GPT and attaching the output to the review verbatim. So we have a completed, tested, and "reviewed by Cyber" tool for our team built in house for our own use. But the two middle managers make a big stink because they are still fighting over ownership.

And where is our manager in all of this? Well he is a non-confrontational opportunist like every other person in leadership at this org, he doesn't want to have our back. First he tries to flip it on us saying we never let him know what we were working on (he attended several meetings with us about it, its on our Jira board, and we did a live demo of it at one point), then he complains we should not be working with managers outside our team (they stuck their noses in it unsolicited and contributed nothing to the effort), then talks about how he does not want to fight other managers on a tool that serves the entire Tech arm of the organization (we developed it entirely in my team, for the break fix people only who are under us on the team, and are the only people who would ever have a use for it), until finally says its not something there is a business need for and won't fulfill our OKRs (so removing human error and improving incident documentation somehow no longer aligns with our OKRs of automating work away and reducing risk). We systematically demolish his arguments in short order and then he decides to go to the new CTO (who he had previously reported to directly) and her plan is to sit down with the respective managers after the holiday weekend and decide who gets to take ownership, which will certainly not be our manager. So the tool we developed totally in house for our team, with cyber approval, and zero involvement of these two parasites is going to be "owned" by either the Facilities Manager or some random administrator from the "user experience" team. The three of us who worked on it are not invited to the discussion.

Breakdown on time spent, three of us working and testing it roughly combined 20 man hours. Cyber approval, done in under a day once we made it clear we were going to make them have to do work if they didn't knock it the fuck off. Pissing contest for who gets credit for work they neither did nor understand has been raging for over two weeks with numerous meetings my team got pulled into. This is hardly a unique story and I am sure every dev, project manager, and sysad has gone through this kind of shit show numerous times. So yeah fuck middle management, for the most part. Overpaid useless turds who are really only good for corralling the dumb dumbs in the non-skilled roles. And I have been in leadership roles and because I actually want to improve things and prevent issues, its been a suck fest the times I have taken on the job. Back before she got promoted to CTO, my bosses boss took our team out to dinner as a thank you for the Crowd Strike debacle (we put in 80 hours for two weeks to help the team that got completely fucked by it because they had zero disaster recover plan in place and still don't) and it was a rare incident of us having any discussion at all. I got asked the same dumb question Kirun put to us about why if I have leadership experience am I not in a leadership role now. My response to her at the time was "Because management, especially at our company, is a popularity contest and not merit based. No one likes the guy who tells the truth." which pretty much blue screened her at the time. But I got maxed review and bonus this year shortly after, so I guess she did not take it too bad. Granted they get me on the cheap as a quid pro quo for my remote arrangements.

So yeah TLDR on this is middle managers are never the rock stars of your company. They are just the guys who got hired due to networking or because they managed to stick around and get peter principled up the chain eventually. And no one in leadership ever considers anything beyond the short term because if the house of cards starts to collapse, they can just golden parachute over to the next company to destroy. If the Poos have not beaten them to the punch.

Rezz said:

Wanting to be in management and actually being in management are very different things. And lets be honest here; if you are changing passwords manually you are doing shit wrong. The admin level you are talking about is and should be absolutely automated out of the tasks for the day. It's the management tier that is between that and actual engineers that is generally the problem.
The thing that comes up is that management looks at numbers and goes "Oh lets just replace Whitey White White with Xao Xing Ling; Xao is cheaper and does the same level of basic work so of course we replace and we all get moneyhats!"

Except Xao is likely trained on a more basic level and doesn't have any other experience other than doing the one thing Xao is hired for. (To be fair, the reality is that you are almost certainly hiring out of Pune and Bob is much less qualified than Xao) and Whitey White White actually has a breadth of knowledge that can be easily adapted to other projects. Xao? Is very good at the one thing they are good at.... and not others. So you have to hire Xao's buddy Xin. Technically still cheaper than Whitey White White, but now you have two very specialized tools vs. having a single multitool. And you have to have management that handles two people vs. one. And you end up with a manager in another country with very different beliefs about how the company is run vs. how it should be run.

So then you need someone to corral the foreign managers, because they think about problems differently, and you end up with another tier of management.

See the problem?

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This is absolutely accurate.

Indian hires can normally only do the exact and singular thing they were hired for. They are unable to handle deviation well and don't learn more breadth of the infrastructure they are working in. As well as trying to offload work onto others constantly.