Japan's cyber-security minister has 'never used a computer'
Maybe I’ll sound like a bitter old techie, but it’s absolutely wrong to have someone with no direct experience managing something that is technical.<p>If you can’t code, you shouldn’t manage coders. If you’re not a lawyer, don’t run a law firm. If you haven’t been in charge of a class of kids, you shouldn’t run a school. And that’s despite the day-to-day of these management roles not touching code&#x2F;clients&#x2F;kids.<p>The experience gained in a few years on any ladder is enough to appreciate most of how people in those fields think.<p>Have you ever tried working for someone who didn’t have relevant experience? You get people deciding that they don’t need an issue tracker, let alone a code repo. You get people who think paying Google 5 bucks a months is not worth it, they’d rather have their own email server. And it’s not that there’s never a case for having your own server, it’s that the case is never made in a technical way (eg we want security &#x2F; uptime &#x2F; whatever). The techies end up having to translate complex reasoning into something a layman could understand, or at least pretend to. A lot of time is wasted explaining things. And then when there’s feedback - and most people cannot resist the temptation to act like they’re contributing - it only makes sense to the non technical staff, while the tech people are trying to implement whatever crazy modification it is they’ve been given.<p>What these people tend to do is to make everything a management issue. So management, just like politics ends up having its own ladder. Relevant experience for being a health minister is to have been an MP. Relevant experience for managing a code department is having managed the interns.<p>It massively corrosive to let this continue.<p>And before someone makes this argument, it&#x27;s perfectly possible for techies to do the managing and politics.