What can a developer respect a manager for?

Question

Project management

Why do you respect managers?

Answer 1

Because it's a way of life.
I will try to present my experience here. I think it's VERY subjective. Alas.
For the last three years, I have had to be a kind of Jack Of All Trades (thankfully, without the continuation of “master of none“). I am the head of the department of automation of the educational process of a rather large, but very sluggish university before this very automation. Life has turned out so that in addition to this I am engaged in web development (rather freelance) and coordination of several semi-closed projects that have grown out of outsourcing.
Accordingly, we have to deal with administrative, organizational and coordinating and directly development work. And draw, typeset, copywrite, test, compile mathematical models, do statistical processing and solder a little.
This, so to speak, is for a deeper understanding of why there will be a lot of subjectivism with a claim to objectivity.
Prior to that, about five years ago, when I was a pure developer, I looked at the work of project / team managers (and why pretend - and at the work of any administrative worker) with contempt bordering on a kind of public riot. Most likely, I just didn’t come across really good PMs that would be able to set up a workflow so that the developer understands that they care about him.
Often I had some questions with which I went not to the project manager (to the boss, director or anyone else who somehow led the project), but to the developer neighbor. Then I agreed with myself that the time spent searching for a solution on the Internet is repeatedly killed by the benefits of a wider front that opens up when examining a problem and stopped going to colleagues for advice. Moreover, as a result, I myself did everything well.
I also didn’t like solving the problem in an ugly way, and this often manifested itself in delaying deadlines. If my boss said to me:
- We urgently need to pass! Stop pulling the rubber, what do you have there, why can't you do it faster?
, then I began to tell him about what needs to be done this way and that, to optimize the samples, to add some abstractions for possible future use and the possibility of extension. At the same time, I frankly could not understand why he needed a crooked and oblique solution, which (if you cut it a little more) will soon become very good and cool.
I killed time for this finishing, as a result I got an allergy to the code and stopped enjoying life and the project. As a result, he did “just to work”, but at the same time delaying the deadlines and getting another attack of peptic ulcer.
Then there were many different events that finally killed the belief in me that a manager is a friend, comrade and practically a brother. These people did not see the problems of the team, did not want to sacrifice their resources to achieve the result, or generally abstracted from the problems behind the mythical scrums, processes, UML and other silver attributes of modern IT.
And then I became the boss.
The head of the swamp, where they did not hear about VCS, for example. Generally. And about design.
After a fairly serious immersion in the problems and understanding of the range of tasks, I wanted to give up, because it was not possible for me to cope here alone. Slowly, I began to recruit a team, while at the same time raising the entire infrastructure for development and assembling a framework for building applications. While the team was getting involved in the work, there was a bunch of all sorts of extraneous affairs, such as administrative wars, in which they had to take part; there was an incompatibility of people in the team and there was a real scuffle; there was disagreement on key architectural design issues. All this had to be sorted out, while trying to hit the deadlines.
So two years flew by. One winter evening, sitting at the drawing of documentation and diagrams at night on the next working weekend, I grabbed my head. I became the very manager, the class of which did not understand and did not accept.
Since then, a lot has changed in my head: I learned to sacrifice perfectionism in favor of completing the task; learned to delegate work; learned to save developers from headaches and confusion in choosing a way to solve problems, acting as a kind of Occam's razor; learned … yes learned a lot of things.
Now I understand that the main job of a manager is, first of all, the reasoned and effective deliverance of the developer (performer, contractor, etc.) from the psychological “headache” that is caused by the fact that he is doing unusual work for him. Actually, for this the developer can respect the manager as a person who professionally performs his work.
No less important things that a manager can earn the respect of a developer are:
a) the opportunity to talk to him, as with the deputy system architect for general issues;
b) the ability to put to bed, tuck in the blanket and read a bedtime story to the professional alter-ego of the developer.
Glory to St. von Neumann, it turns out that there are such people and there are quite a lot of them. In comparing myself with many of them, I understand that I have something to strive for. And this is slowly melting the ice of my internal developer, who is slowly learning to respect managers.

Answer 2

For the fact that he relieves me of the burdensome task of communicating directly with the customer.
For the fact that he understands and correctly describes the desires of the customer, after the implementation of which the latter receives exactly what he wanted.
For the fact that he correctly arranges the stages and knows the price of Wishlist-alterations, especially after the approval of the order.
For creating comfortable and pleasant working conditions (furniture, air, cleanliness, sound insulation, etc.).
In general, for the fact that he understands why he is needed and how his work increases the cost of an hour. And he does it, and does not chat on social networks.

Answer 3

for turning a blind eye when I, instead of directly “implementing a new product feature”, am refactoring, optimizing the core, or automating the build process, deployment. I’m not saying that this happens all the time, it’s just that sometimes it’s really necessary, and the manager can afford to spend a couple of days on this without pestering the questions “When will the new feature be ready?”.

Answer 4

ok, this is really important.
here came across an article the other day - java.dzone.com/articles/fix-code-immediately
however, the loyalty of the manager, on work issues, is a separate issue.

Answer 5

The manager allows you to remain a narrow specialist.
Not spraying on “advertising yourself, searching for a layout designer, communicating with a client” and other things that are not directly related to the main profession.

Answer 6

For having your own serious programming experience and understanding of what the developers are doing.
For understanding which deadlines are real and which are not.
Well, for the fact that a person is normal and adequate.

Answer 7

until I met such a person :( all the PMs that I met were not competent enough. In general, respect appears when a person really knows and can do something, and this is bigger and better than you

Answer 8

I respect if the manager understands why he is needed, that is, he understands that he did not come with a whip, but to create conditions for comfortable work and improve relations in the team and between them.

Answer 9

For the same reason that the MVC Model can respect the Controller.