Premature IT Project Managers
One thing that has particularly puzzled me at work and when talking to friends and friends of friends (hehe no, not at Orkut, but in real life) for a while now is the increasing amount of IT workers fresh out of college/university who want to become Project Managers instantly.
I'm quite biased for such an observation, but I can't help but notice that the most common thing about these people is that they:
a) usually know nothing but Windows;
b) usually know nothing but Java;
c) usually know and apply UML to the most infinitesimal detail.
Now, I'm not particularly against any of these things (I've learned to regard them as penitence, not as sin), and I actually use the three of them at work (gotta feed the family blah blah). Nevertheless I think it does paint a picture of what kind of Project Manager these people will become.
Windows is painful to use. It limits creativity in ways unheard of. When you install it, it's about as good as an empty fridge: it works, but in order to make it useful you have to buy a lot of actual goodies to put inside it. These brilliant managers of the future, bred on the limitations of Windows, will later on try to put Windows everywhere, from the microwave oven (can anyone say bloat?) to the Space Shuttle (we want to bring the astronauts back ALIVE this time, ok?).
Java is ... Java. It looks like C or C++, but it is slow because it is interpreted and relies on a garbage collector for memory management. It encourages slow algorithms or practices, since people don't have to think much anymore because of the garbage collector and the limiting data types, and the massive class library (people ALWAYS try to take advantage of the class library, even if it looks weird and distorted [this will be the subject of another post]). Java is limiting, because people use it as the holy grail of software development and no one is encouraged to perhaps look elsewhere and find languages more suited to the task at hand. Java is the development hammer that makes all software projects look like nails.
I like UML, as I like things that try to order and unify chaos, but people tend to forget that models are models and as such will never be the real thing. You don't implement software in Use Case diagrams and sequences of bubtangles. The UML models should be clean and simple, yet the aspiring 21-year-old Project Managers apply comments and superfluous relations to the limits of the page size. The aspiring 21yoPMs know exacly what kind of arrow head means what in which context, according to whichever post from someone in some mailing list. When it comes to the actual bits, well, you drag and drop some classes and components on Eclipse and it all falls into place, right? Who cares that the software is inneficient (blame the class library!) and that he doesn't know how many bits fit into a signed byte. The aspiring 21yoPM fails to understand that about three people will read the UML diagrams, and millions of people will use his software.
Another quote I could attribute to many of those aspiring 21yoPMs is "I don't like programming". I guess this sums it all up. They don't like programming, which most likely means their computing degree means nothing, yet they want to manage software projects.
heh, I should restrain my verbosity a bit.
I'm quite biased for such an observation, but I can't help but notice that the most common thing about these people is that they:
a) usually know nothing but Windows;
b) usually know nothing but Java;
c) usually know and apply UML to the most infinitesimal detail.
Now, I'm not particularly against any of these things (I've learned to regard them as penitence, not as sin), and I actually use the three of them at work (gotta feed the family blah blah). Nevertheless I think it does paint a picture of what kind of Project Manager these people will become.
Windows is painful to use. It limits creativity in ways unheard of. When you install it, it's about as good as an empty fridge: it works, but in order to make it useful you have to buy a lot of actual goodies to put inside it. These brilliant managers of the future, bred on the limitations of Windows, will later on try to put Windows everywhere, from the microwave oven (can anyone say bloat?) to the Space Shuttle (we want to bring the astronauts back ALIVE this time, ok?).
Java is ... Java. It looks like C or C++, but it is slow because it is interpreted and relies on a garbage collector for memory management. It encourages slow algorithms or practices, since people don't have to think much anymore because of the garbage collector and the limiting data types, and the massive class library (people ALWAYS try to take advantage of the class library, even if it looks weird and distorted [this will be the subject of another post]). Java is limiting, because people use it as the holy grail of software development and no one is encouraged to perhaps look elsewhere and find languages more suited to the task at hand. Java is the development hammer that makes all software projects look like nails.
I like UML, as I like things that try to order and unify chaos, but people tend to forget that models are models and as such will never be the real thing. You don't implement software in Use Case diagrams and sequences of bubtangles. The UML models should be clean and simple, yet the aspiring 21-year-old Project Managers apply comments and superfluous relations to the limits of the page size. The aspiring 21yoPMs know exacly what kind of arrow head means what in which context, according to whichever post from someone in some mailing list. When it comes to the actual bits, well, you drag and drop some classes and components on Eclipse and it all falls into place, right? Who cares that the software is inneficient (blame the class library!) and that he doesn't know how many bits fit into a signed byte. The aspiring 21yoPM fails to understand that about three people will read the UML diagrams, and millions of people will use his software.
Another quote I could attribute to many of those aspiring 21yoPMs is "I don't like programming". I guess this sums it all up. They don't like programming, which most likely means their computing degree means nothing, yet they want to manage software projects.
heh, I should restrain my verbosity a bit.
posted by Fábio Olivé | 10:16
2 Comments:
As I was reading your post, I couldn't help but notice alot of those qualities reflect me. I'm 20, want to be an IT manager, have a dislike for programming, and mainly only know windows. I'm not sure what the reason for me not venturing into unix of any sort, probably mainly because I havnt had anyone to teach me how to use the damn thing. I installed redhat once, trying to learn, but I couldnt even get the network driver installed, so maybe I'll give it another try...
I do agree that Java is a bad language though. I say we all go back to assembly and make programs more efficient. lol
Hehehe take it easy there. The main point in this post is that people who aspire to become IT Project Managers should take some time to experiment with technology. They should broaden their knowledge of technology and understand what they want to manage, because that will give them the gut feeling they will need to give a project its directions, to be good at estimates, and so on.
There's no reason why you can't treat yourself to some different technologies, specially free software things, since they cost close to nothing. And every different bit counts, when it comes to experience in the field.
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