From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.2 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,5ea968aeb8c7f10d X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: antialias@earthlink.net Subject: Re: Do I Really Need A Supervisor? Date: 1997/03/21 Message-ID: <3332ACA3.23AA@earthlink.net>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 227306333 References: <3327438E.942@earthlink.net> Organization: Earthlink Network, Inc. Reply-To: antialias@earthlink.net Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Content-Disposition: inline; filename="032197.txt" Date: 1997-03-21T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Do I Really Need A Supervisor: My Observations of My Supervisors Has my supervisor been a help or a hindrance to the projects I have been on? Below, as an example of one software engineer's experience I summarize the project and the supervisor's role and render my opinion as to the supervisor's helpfulness. Finally, a comment for each as to whether I could have done better with or without that supervisor. I begin my career ten years ago: An IRAD project studying Ada in multiprocessor 1750A runtime system implementations. The supervisor was a physics major, did not know Ada, had about three years experience programming embedded fortran. Was not very helpful. Was needed though, because I and my coworkers were inexperienced. A missile guidance subsystem in 1750A Ada. The supervisor was also a physics major. Did not know Ada, but learned quickly. Did not know how to organize the project. Skipped unit testing went straight to big bang testing, costing us an extra year of effort. Was so-so as a supervisor. I could have done better if he had been more of a leader. A multiprocessor missile guidance system in TMS320C30 and R3000 Ada. The supervisor was a math major. Did not know Ada. Did not care to learn. Mismanaged the project. Project was cancelled by the Air Force and given to our competitors. The supervisor's poor decisions were a major reason the project was cancelled. Would have been much better without her. A multiprocessor electronic warfare system in 68040 Ada. The supervisor knew Ada. Was an EE with a field service engineer background. Was technically bright, aggressive at resolving problems. Spent little time in meetings, a lot of time working on the system. Was very helpful. Was better with him. An avionics test system in 68040 Ada. The supervisor was a chemical engineer who knew a lot of PC buzz words. Was totally technically incompetent. Hired me to fix a problem which took me half an hour to fix. Had me work on it for four months. Was totally useless and a considerable hindrance to the project. The company would have been better without this supervisor. An avionics display system in R3000 Ada. The supervisors (two) were software people. They spent a lot of time arguing with the upper management. When they weren't arguing, they were helpful. I could have gotten the job done without them though. A MIS system in Ada. Three supervisors: A former B-52 pilot who had an HR degree, and two federal employees who were software people. The bomber pilot was dead weight, but a barrel of fun to have around. The other two were competent, but unable to convey what in the world it was that we were supposed to be developing. They managed a staff of twelve, most of which sat around and did nothing useful (one was in charge of monitoring our software reuse. Another was tasked with developing a string manipulation library. Others had no apparent function). The whole project was useless. I fled from it after three months. A tank software system in C. The supervisor was an EE. Was very helpful, but by and large I was left to develop the software for my box on my own, so I guess I didn't really need him to be a supervisor. An electronic warfare system in Ada. The supervisor does not know Ada. Does not have time to do software development. Barely knows what it is that I am working on. I could do the job better on my own. So there you have my opinions. I think I am better off if the supervisor is highly technically competent and smart enough to discard/ignore/hand off the useless management stuff and focus instead on getting software developed. I think I am worse off if I have someone over me who does not know or care about what I am doing and who hides their technical incompetence by burying themselves in management work - meetings, tracking, spreadseets, paperwork, metrics, statistics. It is the software that matters, who should care about anything else? Produce software that passes the tests, and no one really needs all this supervision and management. Save time, save money - reduce supervision of software engineers.