> As long as he has the right people below him and is able to listen to them and exercise judgment, that's what really counts.
So he's a puppet then? Different people just pull on different strings and he makes a call arbitrarily?
While nobody expects the minister in charge of e.g. nuclear power to be a nuclear engineer, we do expect them to understand how the plants basically operate, and common failure conditions.
In this case we have someone expected to make calls about computer security who not only lacks expertise in that area, but even in the broader area of computing. The issue isn't that they aren't a subject matter expert, the issue is that they lack such core foundation that they cannot listen to different subject matter experts and contextualize that information.
I'm all for less technical managers as a concept but there are degrees. If the manager cannot even understand the context, that's a legitimate problem.
> Different people just pull on different strings and he makes a call arbitrarily?
I wouldn't say it was "arbitrary", but yes, he would have to assign responsibility to others for decisions and then trust them. It's not that uncommon.
Assuming we're talking about a functional department (and not a Trump-cabinet-like dysfunctional mess), I think we can safely assume the guy understands the concepts, problems and capability of computers and more importantly how these relate to government.
I once worked with a physics postdoc who LITERALLY never used a computer for his role in the Russian institute in which he worked back in the early 90's. All computer work was allocated out to computing professionals and he just relied on them to do the work in consultation with him. It was kind of strange, but I would say he "understood" computers very well. A similar thing could apply here.
So he's a puppet then? Different people just pull on different strings and he makes a call arbitrarily?
While nobody expects the minister in charge of e.g. nuclear power to be a nuclear engineer, we do expect them to understand how the plants basically operate, and common failure conditions.
In this case we have someone expected to make calls about computer security who not only lacks expertise in that area, but even in the broader area of computing. The issue isn't that they aren't a subject matter expert, the issue is that they lack such core foundation that they cannot listen to different subject matter experts and contextualize that information.
I'm all for less technical managers as a concept but there are degrees. If the manager cannot even understand the context, that's a legitimate problem.