I’m not going to understand anything, call me..

I once had a project leader that required special help at all the project status meetings, this does may sound silly, but it is not, once it becomes obvious that he actually was not capable of doing the work he was hired to do, and that he relied on other people’s explanations to understand what he needed to do and how.

He always contacted developers by IM to ask about the progress of certain task, and about a minute or so into the status report, he would give up and say something like “i don’t understand, call me”, and then, after a second or two, “I’m calling, answer the phone”, this started an internal joke between all developers in which he contacted them by IM saying something like “I’m not going to understand anything, call me” and then closed the IM window and waited for the call..

Once in the call, it became required at all times for people to use metaphors to explain the simplest things, otherwise things would go nowhere and the calls usually ended with everyone really angry and frustrated because of their failure at explaining such a simple issue.

What good is a leader that can’t understand the issues of the project? at the end, this lack of competence will result in harm to the project, as people struggle trying to explain why a new feature can’t be added at this time because the current code base is not able to support the new addition until a later phase of the project, we all know the story, about how he will ask what needs to be done and expect it to be done next day, without actually reasoning and understanding the complexity or relevance of the task.

How people like this get to be on management positions? We once interviewed a candidate for a developer position in our team, he presented a wonderful resume, the guy basically knew everything and had worked for everyone since the year he finished college and before, when half of the interview was gone, we already had noticed he wasn’t very good at coding or, well, anything at all, he also knew we had noticed, so he came up with the following: “I know I’m not very good at software development, but I have great leadership skills, I can manage people and I’m very good at delegating tasks to others”, to which we had to put the call on hold and have a really good laugh, and then, one of the interviewers simply asked “so you are very good at delegating tasks to others, how good are you at being delegated a task from someone else?” and then, the call ended..