Managing Geeks

I have been in the IT industry for more than a few years now and switched a few managers (and work places). Out of all the managers this far, I only had one decent one. In general all the managers I came across seem to be fairly useless. They don’t seem to support the team and always take the most convenient position on matters – which translates to the usual see nothing, do nothing. From time to time I’ve been wondering: “what makes a management job anyways?” – because from my point of view, they don’t bring any value to the team. Perhaps in other industries or places managers are essential, but in development teams…

Today I came across a very interesting article and was somewhat surprised has been written 11 years back. After few moments my surprise turned into a few thoughts, one of which: if information on good management exists, why are there so many useless managers? Naive and rhetorical question, but I do keep asking it from time to time.

If anyone is interested in managing geeks or understanding IT mentality, please read the article and I attached PDF copy in case the article got lost.

Cheers.

Is High Quality Software Worth the Cost? By Martin Fowler

I don’t like using term “fan”, however I do read Martin Fowler’s posts and tend to agree with him a lot. His recent post brought feeling of familiarity and a bit of pain. I would like to share it with anyone who is doing software development.

PDF version

I hope you will find it useful.

N26 coding exercise

A while back, I worked on N26 coding exercise and found the problem quite entertaining. Figured to share it:

N26 coding exercise

Correct, with minor test comments (should not use Thread.sleep(…)) and not entirely efficient but clean and 100% test driven solution can be found here and backup: here.

I think this exercise worth while, do it just for fun and giggles :)