Talking Smack about Management - A Fashion among hardcore techies.

“We are getting dangerously close to management”- says a researcher at a technology company about tech guys making power-point presentations.

“You put it on power-point and those guys will justtttttt nod their head”- says a member of technical staff about convincing the management to accept a proposal.

Hardcore techies always have a problem with management folks. They have a feeling that “those marketing and sales guys” don’t do “high level” work but still make a lot of money, in most cases more than an equivalent tech guy and get much more credit that what they deserve and stuff like that.

Actually, it’s not too difficult to understand why these techies think so. Management is something that sounds pretty “easy-to-do” from outside, and you get the feeling that “all he does is make some slides and present them to a customer” and he gets all the money and credit for just that.

BUT, what these guys don’t understand is this. Though management and various aspects of it including sales, marketing and finance sound pretty “straight-forward” from outside they become quite complicated once you get into it. You need to actually be a marketing manager or a sales manager to understand how difficult it is. Marketing managers need to understand the product and figure out which group of customers they should target. Marketing is a like the back-end of sales, and you need to develop strategies to use the money you have appropriately, figure out which products should be targeted at which markets, analyze the size of your sales force, think about advertising ideas and overall build a brand that will sell. Sales, on the other hand, is the front-end. It’s the last step before which money is generated and sales teams work by numbers. You sell more and the company makes more money. Both these roles, requires a lot of creative energy and skills that are not necessarily picked up in the class room. AND, the only way to find out if these people are successful is the company’s revenues. Unlike tech guys, they don’t have the tools that’ll help them check if they are doing things right.

Engineering and Technology is pretty complicated too, especially in the current state of affairs, things seem to be changing everyday that we constantly need to re-learn and keep ourselves up-to-date on all the new stuff that’s coming up. But the reason why management folks don’t talk smack about techies is that its sounds pretty “complex” from outside.

In short, both technical roles and managerial roles require a set of skills that ensure that you do well in your job. These skills are a combination of some skills that come with experience and some that you have picked up in school. But unless you actually work in either of these roles you don’t understand what goes into actually being successful in whatever you do.