R&R

I have been my new role for almost a month now, a month within which I only spent two nights at my newly purchased house.
What is different to me is that I got to spend a lot of time with customer and had chance to really understand the source of all information. This leads me to start thinking about:

1. The amount of information lost during transmission is unbelievable significant. As a startup, we only recruit people who have been working in this field for long enough time with established records. You might think that we are lucky enough that these pros would be able to interpret, parse and transmit information more accurately and timely. However, the fact turned out that we have got some priority wrong - one particular problem customer has been waiting for over two months as it blocked their development, while our engineers have no idea and were plodding through the bug list in alpha beta order, project team in customer side has been held up. On second thought, it seems while FAEs were focus on the problem to be resolved or tons of emails to reply, or evaluate whether it is ok to nag again for the bug updates, these poor fellows have lost the big picture and ability to make judgement calls.

2. Management is all about communication is exemplified to its extreme in customer management role like this. I have one crazy principle - when I decide to go to bed at night, there will be no unprocessed emails in my inbox, even sometimes it means banging Del key 10 times in a row per second. Because the nature of the role, it seems all natural and makes sense that to keep the communication flow healthily is all is required for this role. You can try that, but my experience tells me that after a very short of time, you will notice that you are not the one in control anymore - not for schedule, not for customer project scope, lose track of what the heck is going on within your engineering department. Why? Simple, because you gave up the right to control! Managing information channel is an auditing job at its best. While it is so important as I explained in previous section, if you choose the easy way out - by managing the results of people's actions reactively, you forgot about the source. If there are some areas could be improved, practice could be less time consuming, process could be less painful and distracting, the best way is to cure the source, to get on top of the fundamental reasons behind symptoms. Real managers manage people, practice, process; mediocre ones massage information; bad managers react to situations.

3. At last, one questions bothers me mostly through half of my professional career is, have we given up the right and ability to be creative, to do something for real? There are numerous blogs and articles talking about how managers with good hands on engineering background tend to screw big time by micro-managing and mistaken the purpose of his/her role just because they got too attached to write few lines of code, carry out some tests, define some protocol etc. By doing this, they lose their focus in their own jobs. Frankly I have probably read and written too much of this to the point everytime this topic pops up, I just want to shout, WHAT THE FUCK a manager's job should be?

Simple definition for manager from my dictionary - a guy whose job is to do whatever is required to accomplish team's goal.

If you need someone to get the code done and the only possible person is you, guess what, you are going to write some code. If you happen to be an expert in some areas your team require some advice, don't be shy, that IS your job. Hard isn't it? That's the price you pay when you want to be on the spotlight.