I agree the article starts off with a very poor assertion about the most important role of a manager, but I don't necessarily agree with your either. I like your change to what the article says, but I still don't think it is the most important part of a manager's job.

IMHO, a manager's job is to ensure their projects are a success. Regardless of which developer or business analysts messes up, the ultimate responsibility always lies on the manager. Many employees don't realize this because they never witness their boss getting yelled at by his boss, but when projects miss their due dates the developers are not the only ones in trouble. Developers probably have a more silo-ed view of the whole project so they can legitimately blame failures on factors outside of their control, but a manager can rarely do that. The buck stops with him.

Bad managers micromanage because they are afraid the job won't be done right and they know their ass in on the line. Good managers find a way of trusting but validating their senior level resources.

While I like the overall message here of not micromanaging, I think an important distinction needs to be made between telling developers how to do their work and constantly validating that developers are doing their work. The latter is counterproductive but the former is absolutely necessary. Junior level employees often don't understand one of the major differences between managers and non-managers: in the eyes of executives your managers are ultimately responsible for the project's success or failure, regardless of who actually messed up. So they absolutely cannot just sit back and wait for developers to be done with their work and hope for the best.

While I agree with this article's advice that a good manager will find ways to take grunt work away from developers, that is such a minor part of their role as manager. The most important, and most difficult, part of being a manager is finding a way of constantly validating the project's progress without being a major hindrance to the developers. There is no easy answer to this that I can give in a Slashdot post, but it is vital to the success of any project.

As a senior level developer, one task I take upon myself is ensuring that our non-technical personnel have a method of validating our work throughout the project. I prefer having these milestones at least every other week. This doesn't have to mean you create a releasable product every other week like some Agile methodologies suggest, but you should at least find a way that your project / product managers, business analysts, and other key stakeholders can validate the project is on track.

When I join a new company (like I just did four months ago) I am very clear with my managers that I will take on this responsibility, but it means they are expected to trust me to do my job as long as they are happy with these validations. So far it has been working well for both me and my employers over the years, although that only comes from experience with two employers since I became a senior level resource.

Here is the software developer version of teachers complaining about parents:

My users are too stupid to figure out my user interface. When my coworkers and customers with similar technical prowess use the software they find it very usable, but the rest of my users are just too dumb. Its not my fault they can't use a computer properly.

I don't think most ed-tech is trying to deskill the teacher. And the underlying motivation is not primarily to increase central planning. The goal is to reduce the amount of manpower per instruction hour necessary to teach. Today's teaching is similar to watching a live play. Watching a live play or musical run by skilled professionals is very expensive because you can only fit so many people into an auditorium. The goal is for technology to play a similar role for teaching as movies and television did for entertainment.

It costs me at least $200 for my wife and I to go see a good production of Les Miserables, but it took us $30 to see the film in the theater and $5 to rent it on our TV at home. Likewise, it takes around $10,000 per year to teach a child the way we do it now, and the hope is that technology can bring this down. This doesn't necessarily mean less learning; it could mean far more. People watch over 30 hours of TV per week, but probably watched less than 5 hours of live entertainment per week before the TV. The hope is that students could also learn an order of magnitude more when teachers are not relied upon as much.

And just like the difference between movies and live entertainment, even when the technology is mature there will still be pros and cons for both teachers and ed-tech. I liked Les Miserables more live than in theater, but I can't imagine be as entertained by a live Mad Max musical/play as I was in the recent movie. Not unless they spent $10 million per showing for proper special effects that is. The same will probably be true for education in the future. Teachers will still exist, and they will be unmatched by technology in certain niches, but overall most education will not come from human teachers. Just like most entertainment is not live today.

While I realize I was an exception, the vast majority of my education was self taught. But the instruction I did get from certain teachers was invaluable. I probably would have been much better suited with 20 hours per week of self learning with improved tools, 5 hours per week being taught by teachers who are experts in specific areas who I interact with remotely, and 5 hours being taught by a local teacher. I think most students would also be better suited in this type of environment, but it may take decades for the technology and processes to get there.

The most important first step is to not have technology replace current processes, but to create entirely new ways of teaching. You don't create a robot to physically flip a burger, you create a conveyor belt to cook it on both sides. Current ed-tech spends far too much time trying to do what teachers do already, only better. This is very unlikely to work.

In most cases it is best for the government to subsidize projects when they are still luxury items, since that is where tomorrow's consumer products start out. By the time they have moved from luxury to consumer products, there is less need for subsidies.

Its not purely a recreational activity, but it is also a recreational activity. And in a modern society, it is primarily a recreational activity. Sex being primarily a procreation activity is as ancient as life being primarily a search for food.

Humans, like almost all animals, are meant to have sex as often as possible. Evolution "made" it so fun so we would do it more. For most animals frequent sex is necessary to have a sufficient number of offspring. That is no longer the case for humans, but our bodies are likely millions of years from adjusting to this change in environment (if it ever even happens naturally).

This is why teaching abstinence as public policy is idiotic. Some parents can be successful at brainwashing their children into being obedient and subservient enough to forgo sex, but any children with a mind of their own who are able to find a partner are going to have sex.

Because nationalities are often used as proxies for race. African American is a term that is more of a nationality, such as Asian. What it really means is negroid or congroid. But very few people are asinine enough to complain about definitions when their is a claim about racism against African Americans. Well, you probably would, based on your post here.

I have yet to run into an independent contractor who was hired because he was cheaper than in house staff. They are usually closer to twice as expensive. Employers generally use these contractors because of labor requirements than cannot be handled by current employees, and that is specialized, short lived in nature, or immediately needed so new hiring or training is not an effective solution. The overhead you mention is baked into the contractor rates.

You are misinformed. First off I don't believe there is a 1080 form. You probably mean a 1099. And there is no requirement to have multiple employers if you are a contractor. It is quite common for a contractor to only have one client at a time, and to have those clients for multiple years. The IRS does spend effort cracking down on companies who abuse the difference between employee and contractor, but the requirement you invented above is not accurate.

This appears to be a very short-sighted way of looking at the cost drivers of this company. The real cost driver is that your labor requirements have been increasing each year, and instead of hiring more entry level workers you have invested in experienced staff that can improve company efficiency. If done well, these experienced workers can reduce your hiring needs by far more than the meager 6-10% raises they have been given. If done poorly, you are wasting those raises on ineffective senior level employees.

Wage creep is similar to scope creep; a small amount is inevitable but proper management can keep it mostly at bay. If someone's wages are going up faster than inflation, they better be bringing more value than they did last year. Paying people more just because of seniority is idiotic. But seniority usually comes with increased knowledge of a company's business processes which does make them more valuable, so increased seniority usually comes with deserved raises above inflation. But your total wages should only go up if your total labor requirements go up. If labor requirements don't go up, and your senior employees are getting better at their jobs, it means there should be corresponding terminations to lower wages because you don't need as many employees anymore.

I can't claim to know how bankruptcy laws work in France, but in the U.S. secured creditors get paid before priority unsecured creditors, which include employee claims for wages. So employees get paid last, since any corporate debt is sure to be secured. This is a company with only $600k per year in revenue that has already filed for bankruptcy once, so I doubt it is standing on a pile of cash.

If the company had the money to pay these severance payments, they wouldn't have had to declare bankruptcy as soon as the courts ruled against them.

I assume employees are hung out to dry when their employer goes BK in France too. Unless the government pays them on behalf of the bankrupt company, or there are assets left over after creditors have been paid (which is very unlikely if the company went bankrupt).

If the company had these debts because of negotiations they made with the employees then I would blame the company's negotiators for the debts. If the company had these debts because of laws, then I would blame the laws for those debts, or perhaps the people who decided to start their company in France and/or not leave the country if these laws were enacted after it was founded.

Regardless, the company would not be bankrupt if the country's laws didn't force them to pay employees who don't even work there anymore. I don't think the company should be able to get out of paying them because that is the law, but it is still the fault of those laws that the company went bankrupt.

That's a really nice fantasy you have there. The employees will likely get absolutely nothing now, because the actual creditors will have priority over any liquidated assets. If they had the money to pay off the workers, they wouldn't being going bankrupt in the first place.

This is the scenario where everyone loses. That is why Mandriva was hoping the courts would allow them to pay in installments.

The employees were left holding the bag anyway, since the company filed bankruptcy and won't be able to pay them. Literally no one won in this scenario. Probably the only people who won were the executives who can now get another CxO job at a company that can give bigger bonuses.