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We've all heard the "herding cats" analogy with regard to managing programmers. Managing sysadmins is like leading a neighborhood gang of neurotic pumas on jet-powered hoverbikes with nasty smack habits and opposable thumbs. Oh, and as a manager you're a neurotic junkie puma too, only they cut your thumbs off and whereas all the other pumas get to drive around on their badass hoverbikes and fire chainguns at the marketing department, YOU have to drive a maroon AMC Gremlin behind them and hand out Band-Aids and smile a lot, when all you're REALLY thinking about is how to get one of them to let you borrow his hoverbike for a few minutes so you can show those fools how it's DONE. This is because managers are usually people who proved that they were handy with a chaingun and were thus rewarded by having their thumbs cut off and their weapons handed to some punk college hire. Let us read from the book of Peter Drucker , Chapter 31, Verse II: Note: HE'S ABOUT TO TELL YOU WHAT MANAGERS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE DOING. Oh, and I turned the original text into a prose poem to make it more Zen. A manager has two specific tasks: The first is creation of a true whole that is Larger than the sum of its parts, A productive entity that turns out more Than the sum of the resources put into it. One analogy is The conductor of a symphony orchestra, Through whose effort, vision, and leadership Individual instrumental parts become The living whole of a musical performance. Imagine a fleet of steely-eyed pumas riding shoulder-to-shoulder on hoverbikes with guns blazing instead of arguing over who should get one of the new laptops. Not only does the manager have to be the organizing influence in order to make that happen, but the manager also needs to have decided to make it happen, even if nobody said it should, if it's the case that the situation demands it. Which is a little implausible, so I'm going to drop the Smack-Puma-Hoverbike model, because it's a little unwieldy for precision work. The second specific task of the manager is To harmonize in every decision and action The requirements of immediate and long-range future. He cannot sacrifice either without endangering the enterprise. He must, so to speak, Keep his nose to the grindstone while Lifting his eyes to the hills -- Which is quite an acrobatic feat. Drucker uses humor like Buddhist monks use honey: when all you get is a teaspoonful once a month, you damn well better appreciate it. And if he does not take care of the next hundred days, There will be no next hundred years -- There may not even be a next five years. To recap: ideally, managers create organizations to carry out their plans, and they keep a watchful eye on their resources, especially the most valuable resource, time. Given that, a few questions arise naturally, and it is the specific responsibility of a manager to find out or figure out answers to them: Why are we here? How do we balance decisions for both immediate and long-term success -- or even just survival? Most of the time, managers' jobs are defined by the rules, processes and implicit and explicit expectations of their management chain; And since the managers are still skilled technical professionals at heart, they also end up doing bits and pieces of their subordinates' jobs which are either too hard for the subordinate or too much fun to resist playing in. And since this takes all available time, nobody goes looking for trouble in the form of the real work -- the work described above, which is uniquely that of a manager and no one else. Why, one might ask, don't more organizations actually coach managers on the practice of management? But without a clear set of goals or a sense of the future, work assignments are made according to whoever's available to do whatever task needs doing, and so strengths are wasted and weaknesses can become bottlenecks. Worse, a failure to consider the future means that problems are solved with brute force when encountered. If the manager were thinking of the long-term considerations, the problems could be captured alive, studied carefully, and then slaughtered and disemboweled, so that the entrails can be studied for signs of what ills the future may hold. As time passes, lack of planning eventually causes a pileup of problems; So in summary, I guess one of the reasons we aren't good at system administration yet is that we aren't good at management either, which can set a practical upper limit on the amount of time we spend developing beyond crisis management and Nerf wars. Fortunately, though, management IS a well-documented discipline, and there exist a few good books to help fill in that gap.
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