That's a awfully large sense of entitlement there, one that is very, very difficult to support. I'm surprised such a comment is coming from you.
Sorry if that's how it sounded; that's not what I intended.
A little background...
I have worked for about 100 managers over the years, and with few exceptions, here's my experience:
- Those who were programmers were able to understand, examine, critique, question, and drive almost anything I worked on.
- Those who were not programmers were able to fit whatever I was doing into their project plan and evaluate it only through the eyes of other programmers (who may or may not have done a very good job of it).
I have also maintained hundreds of thousands of lines of code and I can predict with uncanny accuracy that which was written for a programmer boss and that which wasn't. There is a difference.
There are probably billions (or trillions) of lines of shit code out there that never would have made it through peer review of almost any programmer here at hn. But no one had to worry about that; they were written by programmers working for non-technical bosses.
Hope that paints a better picture of my skepticism :-)
I can certainly attest to shit code getting through non-tech bosses.
It's not just a matter of 'getting away with something' either. A badly managed programmer won't know the larger scope of what they are doing, or even worse be doing something the wrong way because they 'have to', and the code inevitably becomes a series of hacks fixing whatever the latest requirement or problem is.
Sorry if that's how it sounded; that's not what I intended.
A little background...
I have worked for about 100 managers over the years, and with few exceptions, here's my experience:
- Those who were programmers were able to understand, examine, critique, question, and drive almost anything I worked on.
- Those who were not programmers were able to fit whatever I was doing into their project plan and evaluate it only through the eyes of other programmers (who may or may not have done a very good job of it).
I have also maintained hundreds of thousands of lines of code and I can predict with uncanny accuracy that which was written for a programmer boss and that which wasn't. There is a difference.
There are probably billions (or trillions) of lines of shit code out there that never would have made it through peer review of almost any programmer here at hn. But no one had to worry about that; they were written by programmers working for non-technical bosses.
Hope that paints a better picture of my skepticism :-)