The Agile manifesto was originally written, from what I understand, by people who actually understood software.
I just don't understand what logic brought us to this place where it's not seen as weird that someone wholly non-technical and unfamiliar with software can be a manager of a software team (or run a software company, for that matter).
I'm not arguing that software is somehow 'special' either - I'd make the same argument if say, for example, someone wholly unfamiliar with steel fabrication was acting as a factory foreman. Or if me, as a software guy, decided to just one day declare that I'm qualified to successfully manage a farm.
I feel like this is a big part of the problem. Not the whole problem, but a big ccontributor.
> I just don't understand what logic brought us to this place where it's not seen as weird that someone wholly non-technical and unfamiliar with software can be a manager of a software team (or run a software company, for that matter).
"Brought us to this place"? We've always been in that place. In the last few decades, we might have started inching away from it a little bit, we certainly haven't recently arrived at it.
The idea that leadership of an technical organization should be skilled technicians (at least up to the point in the organization where there is a distinctly technical organization) is something that has never been the dominant wisdom in business ("management" as a distinct and transferrable skill set has been more dominant.)
Certainly Lean Software Development (and its direct predecessor in Lean Manufacturing and some of the other things that fed into Lean Manufacturing) tend to hold the position that leadership in a technical organization should be technical, but while that Lean has become powerful in some areas of manufacturing, its never been dominant in software development or business generally.
Agreed. I was working (for) a company that hired an ex-Coke executive as CEO. We made wireless inventory handheld devices. He was clueless; he presided over the decimation of that company and the destruction of its design team.
I just don't understand what logic brought us to this place where it's not seen as weird that someone wholly non-technical and unfamiliar with software can be a manager of a software team (or run a software company, for that matter).
I'm not arguing that software is somehow 'special' either - I'd make the same argument if say, for example, someone wholly unfamiliar with steel fabrication was acting as a factory foreman. Or if me, as a software guy, decided to just one day declare that I'm qualified to successfully manage a farm.
I feel like this is a big part of the problem. Not the whole problem, but a big ccontributor.