"If you have a team that is all pissed off and hates each other, they’re going to write terrible code. I don’t care how talented they are, if they’re mad at each other, pissed off, unhappy, it’s just going to be bad. That was the key insight of Code Complete for me: programming is the art of dealing with people. You think of programming as the art of dealing with the computer, but the computer is pretty much this dumb, dumb machine. It’s easy to deal with the computer. For the most part, what’s difficult is dealing with other people, your team, your manager, your project, and the people who pay you money for the project. That’s the really difficult part and that’s the part that the book really delves into. It does talk about code, but it spends a lot of time talking about personal character and the emotions of the people on your team and how to have a sustainable project that’s not breaking the people working on it. I still love those topics. Those are timeless topics, and that’s why it’s such a great book. That’s why it doesn’t ever really get out of date, because people aren’t going to change for the next ten thousand years, not in that way. In a hundred years we’ll be using radically different tooling, but people will still be pissed off at each other. I’ll tell you that with one hundred percent certainty." excerpt from my section of https://wfsd.com/
@codinghorror My absolutely amazing supervisor was let go last Fall (because some major company level #fails) ... one of the stated reasons was he was a great people manager but didn't have technical depth (he absolutely did have technical depth .... especially in software and networking related areas.) My new supervisor is also a great guy, but he is remote from our team and I maybe see him once every month or two. He has technical depth as required, but not in most of the things we are working on, so I don't know how the leadership changes moved us forward ... feels more like backwards. I'm told I need to learn to work with uncertainty and that no plan survives first contact. (I get this, but I think we should expect plans that survive more than 2 days into each quarter, but I'm not a fancy technically-oriented team manager, so what do I know. I was very vocal in the last planning session and didn't manage to even budge the needle so ... ) Managing people and teams is hard, but made even harder when you blow up what was great and try to force everyone into some other weird mold that everyone is still struggling to understand. I work with many amazing and great coworkers, and pay is pretty ok, so that is what I'm holding on to ...
So all that to say ... your post strikes a real chord.