So this is the (current) opening paragraph for my book:
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There is a common refrain in large companies, almost a badge of
honour.::
"I used to write software, but then I became a manager and
stopped. But I am still technical."
How many of these managers used to read and write English (or Spanish
or Japanese) , and how many, once they became managers, stopped? But
are still literate?
It is no longer possible to manage a company without reading and
writing English (or Spanish or Japanese) But it is possible to do so
without reading or writing code.
This book believes that it will soon be just as impossible to run a
company without reading (and writing) code as it currently is to do
so without English (or Spanish or Japanese).
All companies will be use software to gain what advantages in what
military term "tempo of decision making contests"
This I call software literacy.
#############
The reason we old farts are upset is that there is an artificial divide between coding and the resource allocation and co-ordination of "management".
We need to focus on closing that gap - then coding is how we express most functions of "management".
Tbh I don’t understand how that gap could be closed. It’s not like this is the first generation or career or field with managers and ICs; has it ever closed?
It's politics - if we take a simple view of humanity over past 10,000 years we have seen a drift from "one strong man owns it all do as he says" to more distributed decision making - different resource allocation from different people - different concepts (trade, communication, cities, writing, money) have made it simpler / easier for more people to be invoked in the efficient allocation of resources
I think software is going to be a big part in this
Software already is a big part of this. The whole stack of any organization is plugged into software. From communication, to organization planning (jira?), to spreadsheets. What you call software literacy is already here, but it’s not code for management. Why would they work in code?
I would guess it’ll never be code. If code can handle advanced resource management, then at that point it’s probably AI and there will still be managers just dictating the parameters of how to manage.
I am amazed to think software literacy is here - I envisage the ability to use all the data sources, access the APIs - yet my own anecdata is most decisions trapped in spreadsheets, processes cutting across different apps and storage layers. It's still a mess.
And because it's such a mess, management is mostly about finding the "truth". If a reasonable version of truth were just there, how many people with managers as a title would we need?
Edit: I would also add that software writing is mostly limited to "coders" - most people in organisations don't have the training, and they don't have the access to the tools (permissions) and see above, why would they want it ! Literacy will be when the domain experts, can code as easily as they can write a report and do so to enhance their own needs.
It might be helpful to have a new term for what you describe. While literacy is a part of your vision, it’s not the most lacking part. As you alluded to before many in management know how to code, even up to the Gates and Zucks of the world, and yet here we are without them coding. What you’re dreaming of is the organization and accessibility of data/APIs. And even if you made everyone on earth software literate as you describe that in and of itself wouldn’t help the data accessibility problem.
So how can we get to a world where every decision a manager makes can be informed by an API? Hard to imagine.
Furthermore, I don’t quite agree that managements job can be reduced to truth finding. There’s just as much if not more trade-offs, values, accountability, human management (will there even be an API for 2 of my reports aren’t getting along?), etc. The world is complex and messy, too much so to be 100% defined in code.
I don’t see how this can be distilled into an API worth managements time without very strict schema and behavioral restrictions/enforcement or without AI that does the simplification and aggregation for you.
############
There is a common refrain in large companies, almost a badge of honour.::
How many of these managers used to read and write English (or Spanish or Japanese) , and how many, once they became managers, stopped? But are still literate?It is no longer possible to manage a company without reading and writing English (or Spanish or Japanese) But it is possible to do so without reading or writing code.
This book believes that it will soon be just as impossible to run a company without reading (and writing) code as it currently is to do so without English (or Spanish or Japanese).
All companies will be use software to gain what advantages in what military term "tempo of decision making contests"
This I call software literacy.
#############
The reason we old farts are upset is that there is an artificial divide between coding and the resource allocation and co-ordination of "management".
We need to focus on closing that gap - then coding is how we express most functions of "management".