Everyone knows that managers are clueless. They set impossible deadlines, they can’t delegate properly, they keep changing priorities and so on. Google has 1.8 million pages when searching for clueless manager. Clearly there is a lot of cluelessness going on. In fact managers are so clueless that most nerds don’t bother waiting to see if you’ll turn out to be clueless or not - they simply flip the clueless bit as soon as you are introduced.

New manager’s manager: Hi everyone, this is Manager, your new manager.

Everyone: [Clueless. Another bloodly manager the last one was so clueless. This one looks the same.]

New Manager: Hi everyone, as NMM said I’m your new manager. I’m looking forward to working with you all and finding out how I can help.

Everyone: [Clueless. Just as I thought empty platitudes. Clueless]

Now since you are reading my blog you clearly aren’t clueless are you. Unfortunately, unless you are joining an extraordinary organisation the chances are that lots of people will assume a lack of capability based upon their experience with others. Of course given your boundless ability you’ll turn these people around. Eventually. Until then you’ll have to deal with the consequences.

People who assume you are clueless will be less likely to come to you for help. Why would they bother? You’ll have to work hard to discover when people need help and be careful to actually provide genuine help.

People will assume that you aren’t equipped to understand their nerd problems. Be prepared for lots of slow explanations about how computers work or what XML is.  Worse, you’ll find that people will assume that you don’t care about quality and will sacrifice long-term benefits for short term “progress.

Good luck.

I have a simple test that tells you a lot about the culture of any organisation.  There are two questions you need answer:

1. If you are talking one on one in their office do managers generally answer the phone when it rings (thereby interrupting your conversation) or do they leave it for voicemail?
2. Do managers regularly choose to delay or stand-up multiple subordinates when summoned by their superordinates?

If your answers are interrrupt and stand-up then you have a management culture that believes that they are central to getting things done.  This is, of course, pretty bogus, selfish and arrogant.  If you have only one of interrrupt and stand-up then you have a warning sign.  Hopefully, things are trending away from the arrogant management culture.  Managers exist to enhance the performance of others - if they do their job then they become less necessary.

Have you ever felt that terrible sinking feeling? The one where you realise that the latest upgrade of Super Corporate BlahBlah has broken a huge chunk of the loving customisations you did the year before last? Its a trap - the flexibility trap. Unless you are careful or lucky lots of corporate software forces changes to existing customisations and integrations. So all those special screen hacks you did will break. Those database queries that you use to feed the latest figures into your ERM system - dead.

The trap isn’t triggered when you decide to do a customisation. No its long before that. Its triggered when someone decides to buy software that:

1. needs to be significantly customised to suit your needs; or
2. needs to be customised before it can be used at all.

So what should you do? There isn’t a great deal you can do right now - most corporate software assumes customisation and or massive implementation efforts. Witness PeopleSoft for example. The idea of Opinionated Software as espoused by David Heinemeier Hansson offers some hope in the future:

Opinionated software was a term I coined to describe the rebellion against the fallacy of objective software. That software should be as configurable as possible from the outset to allow every user to bend it exactly to their needs. Opinionated software dares say the customer is not always right. That not everything should be a preference, that decisions can be made once for the better.

I’d like to see that idea take a stronger hold. Be a master chef, prepare me a meal of code that you think is the best it could be. Spare me the construction kit.

If your corporate software was sensibly opinionated then you’d have less customisation to do (as long as you agreed with its opinion). Ideally opinions would be obvious and shared by salespeople (”only buy our stuff if you believe that bug tracking should be a simple three stage process”).

The second trigger of the flexibility trap is software that is an empty shell waiting for you to fill it. Lots of toolkits fit into this category as does some software. For example, I’ve been working with a product that is supposed to provide help-desk style support. It has a workflow engine built into it which must be used. The bloody thing doesn’t even come with a simple workflow process out of the box. Its infinitely customisable, so it can do anything but can you get it to help without becoming an expert in helpdesk processes? No way. A waste of everyone’s time during setup/install and a real pain when it comes to upgrade time. Even if they had a menu of half a dozen standard processes (and optionally customised for those truly special cases) to choose from it would be so much better for everyone (except for their consulting arm). GRRRHFDHHFDHRHEHJHHHH!!!

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Nerdherding for Beginners is written by Michael Harmer, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Australia licence powered by WordPress and designed by XiAP Design Studio.