The Management Team - Guest Post From Joel Spolsky
The saddest thing about the Steve Jobs hagiography is all the young “incubator twerps” strutting around Mountain View deliberately cultivating their worst personality traits because they imagine that’s what made Steve Jobs a design genius. Cum hoc ergo propter hoc, young twerp.I loved the swipe at the fake Steve Jobs's out there. I worked for one, although he wasn't young and it wasn't in Mountain View. He would cite Steve Jobs to defend defective practices. It was ridiculous.It's a great essay, and I like Spolsky's management philosophy a lot, but I don't entirely agree. A business isn't academia. Businesses have to ship products and please their customers, and leaving these tasks to "the crowd" doesn't work. "The crowd", when we're talking about software engineers, produces brilliant chaos. That's great sometimes, and it can produce excellent products, but it's not good when you need focus or to meet a ship date. Sometimes a CEO or CTO needs to decide what gets worked on, how people do it, and to motivate people to make sure it happens.Likewise, sometimes a leader needs to step in and resolve bike-shedding conflicts among two equally smart, strongly opinionated engineers who disagree on a core question, and to look for a compromise. "Management fiat" shouldn't be used lightly, but it's not without purpose.That said, I think Spolsky deserves a lot of props for pointing out that the managerial relationship is two-sided. A lot of companies and bosses don't figure this out until they face uncontrollable talent bleed, and even then there's a lot of self-deception (I've known some ineffective managers to become bitter about their best reports "abandoning" them, as if it were some ethical lapse, but never to own up to their role).