DISCLAIMER: The comments here in no way reflect the work situation of my current employer, Dogster, or current clients, or any of my previous employers or clients.
I’ll share two secrets with you: Coders dislike their managers. Managers dislike their coders.
According to the 2007 Goldman Sachs survey of employee job satisfaction, most workers want out of their jobs, and tech work ranked in the top 5 of jobs with the least satisfaction.
I am concerned with coders and managers who don’t have the work situation I have, and I think that there are certain mythologies that coders and managers have that prevent them from having job satisfaction.
I think Hegel is the instigator of these mythologies.
I found these mythologies that coders and managers base their gripes on within what Hegel calls the Master-Slave Dialectic.
I encourage you to read the wikipedia entries.
I will follow up with two posts.
Part I: I talk about how coders use mythologies that prevent them from seeing their work situation for what it is. Although these mythologies originate in Hegel, they pervade media, e.g. Dilbert.
Part II: What do managers say about coders? To get to this information, you have to go behind the scenes. It isn’t at all pretty the sorts of prejudices managers have towards their coders, and if they could free themselves from these, they would enjoy management much more.