McFilter

How To Manage Smart People

The style of management described in How to manage smart people reminds me of one of my favourite maxims about managing:

As a good manager, when things go well it was down to the efforts of my team; when things go badly it was my fault. As a bad manager, when things go well it was my skilled management which won the day; when things go badly it was due to failings of the team.

The only area the article doesn't cover is dealing with people who don't want to be part of the team. The sort of person who wants to be left in the corner hacking, and not have to communicate with anyone else, nor answer to such non-coder frivolitites such as deadlines.

Luckily such people are fairly rare (I reckon around 2% of the engineers that I've worked with), as I don't have any wisdom to add. I haven't had to manage anyone like that for any period of time, so maybe it just takes longer to work out how to get them on board.

Apart from that, a good article, and I think it pretty much describes how I manage; of course, to find out if that's true you'd have to ask someone I've managed.